The case for Red meat - a Marxist defense of meat-eating

New Zealand schools have introduced a climate change resource that suggests children “eat less meat and dairy”, even though teachers will not know how much meat or dairy any child in their care has eaten. Opinion pieces in the papers have called for the reduction of meat and dairy in hospital menus, not usually generous sources of such foods, despite the well-known risks of undernutrition, especially of protein, in the frail and elderly. Globally, the influential and once-objective medical journal the Lancet has hosted Eat Lancet, a coalition of vegan and vegetarian technocrats backed by processed food manufacturers, and promoted their agenda. The Guardian newspaper accepted an $886,600 grant from the backers of Impossible Foods to run a series of articles against animal agriculture.

These initiatives, aimed at remodelling our food supply in a way that favours the multinational food processing and seed-and-chemical corporations, whose control of many aspects of farming and diet is already problematic, have run far ahead of the scientific community’s efforts to understand the health effects of such dietary change.

Our hunter-gatherer past

The Neolithic Revolution was the first alteration in human affairs that is generally considered worthy of the term Revolution. In Marx’s terms, it saw a change in the means of production sufficient to form new classes aware of their identities, and thus a change in the relations between people. Early humans had fed themselves in an opportunistic, hunter-gatherer fashion that tended to favour a diet of animals supplemented with plants where and when these were available. Large animals made the best meals but gathering activities could collect many smaller ones, as well as eggs, grubs etc.

The people of the Mesolithic era discovered that some animals could be herded and some plants grown in gardens (not usually by the same community, because one activity favours nomadism and the other favours a sedentary habit) but these activities, which greatly improved food security after the decline of the prehistoric mega-fauna due to hunting and climate pressures, tended to occur at the communal level and probably did not create major class differences between the people involved.

The invention of farming

The Neolithic Revolution, which unleashed the human potential for war, creativity, and social division, resulted from the identification of the germs of plants (specifically grains and legumes) as durable sources of energy. If grains were grown (I will use grains in the wider sense of “cereals”, after Braudel, including other dried germs such as peas) and there was a surplus, this surplus would still be edible over the next year, a year when drought or pests or diseases might wipe out the other food sources that hunter-gatherers depended on. This advantage was offset by the nutritional poverty of grain-based diets, so that tuberculosis probably became an endemic disease during this period,[1] but the existence of a less-perishable surplus allowed the diversion of part of the population away from food gathering for large parts of the year, and saw the creation of armies and other workforces.

In Europe, the Neolithic Revolution is dated at around 10,000 BC and its arrangements are a matter of prehistory, but in China this change occurred later and the written record around Bi-gu or grain avoidance includes folk-memories of conflict between grain eating and grain avoiding peoples.

The history of colonisation is the history of the conquest of lactose-intolerant peoples by lactose-tolerant populations, and of non-grain eaters by grain-eaters. In the Indian sub-continent, a combination of dairy herding and a cereal diet high in legumes uniquely allowed the survival of a substantially vegetarian population, and saw the conservation of genes favouring reproduction on such a diet, including genetic polymorphisms still rare in European populations (adaptive mutations only predominate where many individuals without them have failed to survive or reproduce).[2] That the Indian social system became more aggressively class-based than any other is probably no co-incidence; prejudice against meat-eating is still used as a tool of social control against minorities, while meat-eating is one way young Indians today identify as modern and egalitarian. However there were some important exceptions to the trend – the Aztecs were a hunter-gather people who conquered and dominated the Mesolithic agriculturalists of Mexico, and the Mongols were nomadic herders and hunters whose greater stamina and independence allowed them to defeat the rice-fed armies of the Chinese Emperors (after conquering this breadbasket, the successive Mongol Khans seem to have eaten and drunk themselves to death).

Early vegetarian ideology

In the European and Asian cereal-based societies the poorest classes went without meat, supplementing cereals when possible with buttermilk or blood pudding which were more economic replacements. The rich ate as much meat as they could. The idea that an entire society might avoid meat is a recent one with its roots in religious practice, and, insofar as it has any political basis, this flows in two distinct streams – the eco-fascist, in which meat avoidance is a sign of “purity”, most humans are a burden on the Earth, and the Indian vegetarians are of course Aryans. This is something like the vegetarian vision that Adolf Hitler picked up while studying anti-Semitism with Wagner’s heirs at Bayreuth.

And then there is a Marxist-Anarchist, and latterly Intersectional, version, founded on a valuation of animal rights as inseparable from, and a logical extension of, human rights. Vegetarianism was a frequent obsession of the early British Socialists; G.B. Shaw, who derived most of his energy from dairy fat and lived to the age of 94, made himself into a well-known example, and the idea was sufficiently entrenched among the British Socialists and their milieu that H.G. Wells preserved its internal contradictions for posterity in The Time Machine. In his far-future vision, humanity has evolved into two separate species. The Morlocks are descendants of working-class meat-eaters, the Eloi of leisure-class vegetarians – all Wells’ loathing is reserved for the Morlocks, yet it is obvious they are (still) the engineering brains keeping their world running and the Eloi fed. The Eloi are useless for anything but enjoying the sunshine and feeding the Morlocks, and the discordance in Wells’ progressive values as he describes both species is as shocking as anything else in the story.   "But gradually the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages."

The first large-scale experiment in plant-based protein was attempted by the Bolsheviks. As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story, but the bare bones are that the Soviets found their initial attempts to remodel the countryside rebuffed, blamed this on the recaltricance of the kulak class, and set out to destroy them. The problem being that the kulaks, owning most of the cattle and sheep across the Russian Republics, helped to feed the people. Beginning in the 1920s, soy experts from the USA (then the Western world’s leading soy producer) were among the many foreign technicians imported into Russia, and soy processing plants were built and soy production increased to 283,000 tonnes in 1931, the year Stalin unleashed enforced collectivisation and the terror against the kulaks (and also the Kazakhs, a herding people who suffered the largest proportionate loss of life during this period). This led to the loss of millions of animals, either killed by their dispossessed owners or mismanaged by their inexperienced new owners. The soy project was hardly able to prevent the massive famines that followed, and by 1935 soy production had dropped to 54,000 tonnes. Though soy milk would later prove useful during the siege of Leningrad, by the 1930s soy had probably only served one purpose, as a statistic needed aforehand to quell the objections of pragmatic delegates to the destruction of the kulaks and their livestock.

Today we face the revival of this idea, of plant protein that will create a world with no need for animal protein, and the remodelling of life in the countryside, with the new impetus of climate change as its driver. Livestock cycles natural carbon, meaning there is no net addition of C02 to the atmosphere – and its contribution to the shorter-lived methane precursor has not changed since 2000 (methane rises have been due to fracking, methane itself AKA “natural gas”, landfill, and rice production; methane-emitting animals have always existed on Earth in substantial numbers, and have not created a novel situation in the sense that the discovery of coal, oil and gas did). We have recently seen how much global disruption is required to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions to 2006 levels, levels which will still warm the planet if they continue. It could be still be worth reducing agricultural cycling of CO2 through methane, which is more warming than CO2 if this is cost-free, but is it?

Why humans evolved as meat eaters

  Animal foods, and especially red meat, supply a constellation of nutrients not found together (if they are found at all) in any plant food. Nutrients are those chemicals essential for the functioning of the human organism, and plants, but not livestock, can survive well without nutrients such as amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are essential to humans. Surviving as a vegetarian or vegan is possible for some (perhaps assuming the genetic variants referred to earlier are present) but to thrive requires knowledge of these nutrients, where to find them, how to process the foods that supply them, or how to supplement them. Thriving as an omnivore or even a complete carnivore does not – nutritional sufficiency is the reason we evolved eating meat and other animal foods long before we learned there were such things as essential nutrients.

The reasons for avoiding meat or all animal foods can have a class basis – veganism may be taken up by educated middle-class adults, more likely to be exposed to “health food” ideas and aware of the need to supplement, some of whom then commercialise their habits as social media “influencers”. Meat avoidance is also being adopted increasingly by educated middle-class children for identity or compassionate reasons, but the poor may also avoid meat because of its cost when a loaf of bread or a packet of flavoured noodles can be bought for a dollar; these two motivations sometimes coincide when students in temporary poverty make a virtue of what they perceive to be a necessity.

Does the meat-avoiding behaviour of young people have unintended costs? Several observational studies have looked at the characteristics of meat-avoiding populations and found alarming increases in depression, anxiety and self-harm.

“The majority of studies, and especially the higher quality studies, showed that those who avoided meat consumption had significantly higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm behaviors. There was mixed evidence for temporal relations, but study designs and a lack of rigor precluded inferences of causal relations. Our study does not support meat avoidance as a strategy to benefit psychological health.”[3]

How can we explain these correlations? Why should we assume that they are causal? There are several lines of evidence to support a causal link:

1) several nutrients found in meat and animal foods are important factors in mood and cognition; vitamin B12, iron, carnitine, DHA, choline and tryptophan are some examples.[4]

2) the fatty acid mix in dairy and red meat has a similar composition to that of amniotic fluid and breast milk which has anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) effects in young animals.[5]

3) soy is a convenient and cheap replacement for animal protein; soy processing in Western diets results in a 10-fold higher level of the estrogenic contaminant isoflavone than that found in Asian diets.[6] Soy isoflavone causes anxiety behaviour in young female animals, and there is evidence supporting psychotropic and hormonal effects in humans.[7,8,9.10] Interestingly, while right-wing critiques of soy eating focus on effects it can have on young men, the scientific evidence for adverse effects in younger females, converting to HRT-like benefits after menopause, is stronger.[11]

4) other toxins found in plants, such as salicylates and oxalates, as well as problematic proteins such as gliadin/gluten and zein, may be present at higher levels in meat-free diets (but are not unique to them). A vegan mince sold in Countdown supermarkets is simply a coloured blend of soy protein and gluten, a protein linked to the risk of schizophrenia.[12]

In the New Zealand context it would be relatively easy to confirm or dispute some of these associations. Everyone admitted to hospital for longer than a day supplies their dietary preferences. The dietetic preference data from psychiatric admissions could be both linked to outcomes over time and compared with the population average distribution, or the distribution in a ward where diet is least likely to play a role in admissions.

Iron deficiency in women

Young women in New Zealand are the most likely to report being vegan or vegetarian in surveys, as elsewhere in the world. Vegans in the Gender Studies field generate papers linking meat to masculinity, with the implication that this masculinity is toxic and might be improved by a plant-based diet.[13] The corollary of this belief – that women may therefore be weakened by meat-avoidance – is never considered. In a 1980 essay by Gloria Steinem called The Politics of Food (in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) she describes some of the cultural constructs by which women are deprived of the good nutrition which men use to stay dominant. The belief that men need to eat red meat more often than women may have been valid when the average man was more likely to have to survive an attack by a wild bear than the average woman, but today it is mainly women who suffer from serious iron deficiency. The rate – and the cost to the health system – is increasing in New Zealand as more women give up meat. Iron deficiency anaemia in early pregnancy is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in children, not an outcome that will increase the mother’s autonomy.[14]

In Georg Büchner’s 19th century “working class tragedy” Woyzeck, filmed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the leading role and the subject of an opera by Alban Berg, the title character, a soldier, is subject to experimentation by a sadistic army doctor. The experiment involves Woyzeck living on nothing but peas. Peas may supply a complete protein, but Woyzeck goes insane; the deprivation being the final straw in his alienation. James Cameron, the film-maker responsible for Avatar and Titanic, is investing heavily in pea protein as if this were his gift to New Zealand. I am not sure whether he has watched Woyzeck – one would think he has.

Plant-based vs meat-based

Again, we have the specificity of plant germs as commodity; their low cost of production, long storage life and versatility of processing outcomes makes them an ideal investment and a robust one, as poverty and adversity increases their consumption, as we saw during the 2020 Lockdown Event. However, a plant-based burger is nutritionally greatly inferior to a meat burger, and that burger is often the most nutritious single food item many will people eat in the course of their day. The current push to eat a plant-based diet for “planetary health” is something that all the multinational food processors have signed up and provided funding for, and why not – Coca Cola, Unilever, Nestlé have always sold us plant-based foods. We notice that while iron-deficiency anaemia increases in New Zealand with the reason in plain sight, Nestlé scientists here in NZ are developing a more potent form of supplemental iron to add value to their products as their parent company backs the push to reduce meat.  (As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story).

But, you may well ask, isn’t eating meat linked to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease? These associations are small to begin with, but they are also intensely confounded by social class and educational status. Supposing a factory that makes a carcinogenic chemical is hiring. Who is more likely to apply for that job – a meat eater (who will likely have a bigger family to support, among other considerations) or a vegan? Who, so to speak, eats all the pies, and needs food that is filling and nutritious without having to give it much thought? Who is more likely to work two jobs and be exposed to the disruptive metabolic effect of shift work? Carcinogen exposure and shift work are just two of the confounding variables ignored in diet epidemiology.  (That meat-eating in Western populations may symbolise or associate with labour itself – as it did for H.G. Wells when he wrote The Time Machine – is not a consideration I have found discussed in the epidemiological literature.)

Certainly one can think of mechanisms that might link meat to disease, as one can with any food, but one can also think of protective mechanisms; several of the nutrients found mainly or only in animal foods are required for various antioxidant and immune defensive enzymes, and some like carnitine and EPA even have a place in the management of heart disease.

The argument against meat-eating should not be confused with the argument for sometimes rationing a valuable food that is in short supply. The wartime rationing of meat in the UK is thought to have improved the health of the poorest by guaranteeing a greater supply than they had had previously, at a more affordable price. In Europe, the peasants who supplied the cities with meat, dairy and luxury foods such as oysters were sometimes forced by network disruptions to consume these foods – which many of them had never tasted before – with benefit to their own health.

The plant-based agenda can scarcely be expected to recognise these benefits, or understand the argument summarised by Williams and Dunbar (with regard to the vitamin nicotinamide and amino acid tryptophan in their tuberculosis paper), that if better data collection and analysis resulted in us ”…returning to our egalitarian past and redistributing meat or its components that supply NAD (avoiding both the highs and the lows between individuals and over individual lifetimes) [this] may be more effective than subsidizing corn grain (while the increased prosperity from unlocking human potential should pay for the intervention).”[1]

Progress – which includes unlocking human potential from the chains of preventable mental and physical disease – depends on good data, and we do not yet seem to collate the data required to know whether or for whom plant-based diets are safe in New Zealand.

George Henderson works as a researcher for Professor Grant Schofield and the team behind the What The Fat books and the social enterprise PreKure, which has been running free lifestyle and health programs through the lockdown. He is the author or co-author of several scientific articles and letters published by the BMJ, Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the JAMA, and other journals, including an influential review of low carbohydrate diets in diabetes management for the New Zealand Medical Journal. A musician, songwriter and amateur musicologist, he has recently presented a series of podcasts on 20th century women composers for Karyn Hay’s Lately show on RNZ.

References:

[1] Williams AC, Dunbar RI. Big brains, meat, tuberculosis, and the nicotinamide switches: co-evolutionary relationships with modern repercussions?. Int J Tryptophan Res. 2013;6:73‐88. Published 2013 Oct 15. doi:10.4137/IJTR.S12838

[2] Kothapalli KS, Ye K, Gadgil MS, et al. Positive Selection on a Regulatory Insertion-Deletion Polymorphism in FADS2 Influences Apparent Endogenous Synthesis of Arachidonic Acid. Mol Biol Evol. 2016;33(7):1726‐1739. doi:10.1093/molbev/msw049

[3] Urska Dobersek, Gabrielle Wy, Joshua Adkins, Sydney Altmeyer, Kaitlin Krout, Carl J. Lavie & Edward Archer (2020) Meat and mental health: a systematic review of meat abstention and depression, anxiety, and related phenomena, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2020.1741505

[4] Frédéric Leroy & Nathan Cofnas (2019) Should dietary guidelines recommend low red meat intake?, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2019.1657063

[5] Contreras CM, Rodríguez-Landa JF, García-Ríos RI, Cueto-Escobedo J, Guillen-Ruiz G, Bernal-Morales B. Myristic acid produces anxiolytic-like effects in Wistar rats in the elevated plus maze. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:492141. doi:10.1155/2014/492141

[6] Fernandez-Lopez A, Lamothe V, Delample M, Denayrolles M, Bennetau-Pelissero C. Removing isoflavones from modern soyfood: Why and how?. Food Chem. 2016;210:286‐294. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.04.126

[7] Hicks KD, Sullivan AW, Cao J, Sluzas E, Rebuli M, Patisaul HB. Interaction of bisphenol A (BPA) and soy phytoestrogens on sexually dimorphic sociosexual behaviors in male and female rats. Horm Behav. 2016;84:121‐126. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.06.010

[8] Tillett T. Full of beans? Early soy exposure associated with less feminine play in girls [published correction appears in Environ Health Perspect. 2012 Jan;120(1):A17]. Environ Health Perspect. 2011;119(12):A525. doi:10.1289/ehp.119-a525b

[9] Adgent MA, Daniels JL, Rogan WJ, et al. Early-life soy exposure and age at menarche. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2012;26(2):163‐175. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2011.01244.x

[10] Hibbeln, J.R., SanGiovanni, J.P., Golding, J., Emmett, P.M., Northstone, K., Davis, J.M., Schuckit, M. and Heron, J. (2017), Meat Consumption During Pregnancy and Substance Misuse Among Adolescent Offspring: Stratification of TCN2 Genetic Variants. Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 41: 1928-1937. doi:10.1111/acer.13494

[11] Patisaul HB, Jefferson W. The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2010;31(4):400‐419. doi:10.1016/j.yfrne.2010.03.003

[12] Čiháková D, Eaton WW, Talor MV, et al. Gliadin-related antibodies in schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2018;195:585‐586. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.051

[13] Jessica Greenebaum & Brandon Dexter (2018) Vegan men and hybrid masculinity, Journal of Gender Studies, 27:6, 637-648, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1287064

[14] Wiegersma AM, Dalman C, Lee BK, Karlsson H, Gardner RM. Association of Prenatal Maternal Anemia With Neurodevelopmental Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(12):1294–1304. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2309

This article originally appeared on the Redliner blog

Vegetarianism - a warning from history Pt 2 - Shelly's vegetarian experiments.

Vegan diets and the risk of deficiency diseases – the story of Shelly

One of the earliest objective accounts of the effects of a vegetarian diet in English is Thomas Love Peacock’s observations of his friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly. I think these are interesting because Shelly’s ordeal is very similar to what enthusiastic young people subject themselves to today, and because Peacock’s dry humour can speak for the rest of us.
Quotes are from Thomas Love Peacock’s Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelly.
http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/2/41/peacocksmemoirso00peacuoft/peacocksmemoirso00peacuoft.pdf

Shelly had come under the influence of JF Newton, author of The Return to Nature, or A Defense of the Vegetable Regimen.
https://archive.org/details/returntonatureor00newt

Peacock wrote of Newton “He was an estimable man and an agreeable companion, and he was not the less amusing that he was the absolute impersonation of a single theory, or rather of two single theories rolled into one. He held that all diseases and all aberrations, moral and physical, had their origin in the use of animal food and of fermented and spirituous liquors; that the universal adoption of a diet of roots, fruits, and distilled water, would restore the golden age of universal health, purity, and peace ; that this most ancient and sublime morality was mystically inculcated in the most ancient Zodiac, which was that of Dendera…”[I will spare you Peacock’s lengthy exposition of this astrological system]

“At Bracknell, Shelley was surrounded by a numerous society, all in a great measure of his own opinions in relation to religion and politics, and the larger portion of them in relation to vegetable diet”
Shelley had published the treatise, A Vindication of Natural Diet, in 1813.
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/shelley01.htm
But Peacock was skeptical of Shelly’s claims to superior health;

His vegetable diet entered for something into his restlessness. When he was fixed in a place he adhered to this diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree with him; it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick - coming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place. While he was living from inn to inn he was obliged to live, as he said, ' on what he could get '; that is to say, like other people.  When he got well under this process he gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it. Once, when I was living in the country, I received a note from him wishing me to call on him in London. I did so, and found him ill in bed. He said, ' You are looking well. I suppose you go on in your old way, living on animal food and fermented liquor ?' I answered in the affirmative. ' And here,' he said, ' you see a vegetable feeder overcome by disease.' I said, ' Perhaps the diet is the cause.' This he would by no means allow ; but it was not long before he was again posting through some yet unvisited wilds, and recovering his health as usual, by living ' on what he could get '.

In Edinburgh he became acquainted with a young Brazilian named Baptista, who had gone there to study medicine by his father's desire, and not from any vocation to the science, which he cordially abominated, as being all hypothesis, without the fraction of a basis of certainty to rest on. They corresponded after Shelley left Edinburgh, and subsequently renewed their intimacy in London. He was a frank, warm-hearted, very gentlemanly young man. He was a great enthusiast, and sympathized earnestly in all Shelley's views, even to the adoption of vegetable diet. He made some progress in a translation of Queen Mab into Portuguese. He showed me a sonnet, which he intended to prefix to his translation. It began — Sublime Shelley, cantor di verdade !
and ended — Surja Queen Mab a restaurar o mundo.
I have forgotten the intermediate lines. But he died early, of a disease of the lungs. The climate did not suit him, and he exposed himself to it incautiously.

On our way up, at Oxford, he [Shelly] was so much out of order that he feared being obliged to return. He had been living chiefly on tea and bread and butter, drinking occasionally a sort of spurious lemonade, made of some powder in a box, which, as he was reading at the time the Tale of a Tub, he called the powder of pimperlimpimp. He consulted a doctor, who may have done him some good, but it was not apparent. I told him, If he would allow me to prescribe for him, I would set him to rights." He asked, ‘What would be your prescription ? ' I said, ' Three mutton chops, well peppered/ He said, ' Do you really think so? ' I said, ' I am sure of it." He took the prescription; the success was obvious and immediate. He lived in my way for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.

(There is a confirmation of Peacock’s statement above in a letter Shelly wrote to Hogg in September, 1815, 'on my return from a water excursion on the Thames,' in which Shelley remarks that 'the exercise and dissipation of mind attached to such an expedition have produced so favourable an effect on my health, that my habitual dejection and irritability have almost deserted me.’)

At the time of publishing A Vindication of Natural Diet, Shelly was subject to bizarre hallucinations and phobias, an example of which is given below by Peacock

About the end of 1813, Shelley was troubled by one of his most extraordinary delusions. He fancied that a fat old woman who sat opposite to him in a mail coach was afflicted with elephantiasis, that the disease was infectious and incurable, and that he had caught it from her. He was continually on the watch for its symptoms ; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands, arms, and neck very tight, and if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him, and endeavour by a corresponding pressure to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. His friends took various methods of dispelling the delusion. I quoted to him the words of Lucretius : —

Est elephas morbus, qui propter flumina Nili Gignitur Aegypto in media, neque praelerea usquam. *

He said these verses were the greatest comfort he had. When he found that, as the days rolled on, his legs retained their proportion, and his skin its smoothness, the delusion died away.

* the gist of this quote seems to be that elephantiasis is only generated from the waters of the Nile.

Is Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) use making the Covid-19 pandemic worse?

I've written in an earlier post about what's wrong with recommending paracetamol to people with Covid. There are no RCTs to show it's safe, and there are undisputed findings from toxicology and Covid-10 pathology which, taken together, suggest a potential for danger,[1]

Paracetamol overdoses used to kill around 200 people a year in New Zealand according to data which was regularly published in the 1970's and 1980's. Today the policy is to censor any information related to suicide. Does this work? On the one hand copy-cat effects are easy to confirm in real life, on the other hand the problem seems to have gotten worse overall under this "hear no evil" policy.
At any rate, deaths due to paracetamol fell sharply when Parvolex (NAC) was introduced as an antidote (which happened much later than it should have, and today the standard treatment seems to be reduced glutathione.[2]
Paracetamol (acetaminophen) metabolises to a free radical, which peroxidises lipids within the liver, causing liver failure. Glutathione, a reduced antioxidant peptide renewed by selenium enzymes, is the primary defense against lipid peroxidation. Lipid peroxidation is how SARS-CoV-2 destroys the lungs. The toxic metabolite is formed by CYP450 E21 enzyme degradation. In animal models, a diet high in polyunsaturated fat (the most peroxidizable fatty acids) and low in protein (the source of glutathione) accelerates liver damage caused by paracetamol toxicity - diets high in saturated fats and protein are protective.[3]

It's been suggested, based on a rational understanding of processes which as I've said are nowhere being disputed, that paracetamol, by increasing glutathione consumption, will have adverse effects on the people most vulnerable to Covid.[1]

To be honest I thought these effects were likely to be swallowed up in the noise of covid interactions, and appear as quite small risks in epidemiology until things were better understood.
I was wrong.[4]

METHODS: We conducted a retrospective analysis of patients admitted at Washington Hospital Center between February 2020 and- June 2020. Patients older than 18 years of age, diagnosed with COVID-19 were included in the study. Those who were directly admitted to the ICU were excluded. Acetaminophen exposure was calculated using a formula for average adjusted daily acetaminophen: total acetaminophen divided by number of day’s medication was administered. Groups were stratified to non-exposed and exposed. Within the exposed groups, we further divided them into moderate (100-1000 mg/day) or high exposure(>1000 mg/day). Comparison between groups for continuous variables was conducted using Kruskal Wallis test. Association between two categorical variables was tested using Fisher's exact test.

RESULTS: The cohort included 524 patients with non-exposed (n=136), moderate exposure (n=256), and high exposure (n=132) categories. Multivariable logistic regression showed that patients who were exposed to acetaminophen had a significantly higher odds of being triaged to a higher level of care [3.01 (CI 1.4-7.07 p <0.007) in moderate exposure group and 3.44 (CI 1.49-8.54 p<0.005) in high exposure groups]. Secondary outcomes included longer length of stay (5 vs 10 days, p < 0.001), higher mortality (5.1% vs 16.5% p = 0.001) and higher risk of requiring the ventilator support (2.9% vs 15.5% p<0.001) in the exposed group.

CONCLUSIONS: Previous studies have demonstrated that up to 85% of patients with COVID-19 develop fever and acetaminophen is commonly used as a treatment. Our study showed that acetaminophen exposure was associated with worse outcomes. Further studies are required to investigate this association, in particular to see if having a greater number of febrile episodes is independently associated with these same outcomes.[4]

Those are huge ORs. It's possible that fever itself, for which the paracetamol is being given, instead predicts the outcome.

In this paper, fever is associated with a 4x higher rate of adverse outcomes.[5]  This is concentrated in the symptomatic febrile cases, of whom only 4.8% received NSAIDs. Of course some studies say paracetamol is not an NSAID, others say it is, so it's possibly not even recorded correctly. However, as stated, this is a low correlation between fever and NSAID use, one which would not strongly support confounding-by-indication if it applied to the first paper..

So we have an unsatisfactory situation - a drug that WAS NEVER TESTED is being widely used by people with COVID-19. It's now associated with them getting worse. This could be due to confounding-by-indication, but no-one knows yet.

It's been three fucking years. I'm trying to follow the science, but it's always nodding off.


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References

1] Sestili P., Fimognari C. Paracetamol-Induced Glutathione Consumption: Is There a Link With Severe COVID-19 Illness? (2020)  Frontiers in Pharmacology,  11, art. no. 579944

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.579944/full  

2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/

 
3] Hwang J. Diets with corn oil and/or low protein increase acute acetaminophen hepatotoxicity compared to diets with beef tallow in a rat model. Nutr Res Pract. 2009;3(2):95-101. doi:10.4162/nrp.2009.3.2.95
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2788177/

4] Manjani L, Desai N, Kohli A, Arya R, Woods C, Desale S. Effects of acetaminophen on outcomes in patients hospitalized with COVID-10. Presented at: CHEST 2021; October 17-20, 2021; Orlando, FL/Virtual. Abstract  A1072.

5] Chew, N W et al. “Fever as a predictor of adverse outcomes in COVID-19.” QJM : monthly journal of the Association of Physicians vol. 114,10 (2021): 706-714. doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcab023
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33533902/ 

Vegetarianism and the Occult - A Warning from History

This post first appeared early last year as a paywalled post on my Patreon blog. If you want to support my esoteric dietary researches, become a subscriber!

The following is an excerpt from a book by Dion Fortune - Moon Magic, most likely.
Fortune was an influential UK occultist who codified the esoteric practice of her time for the mass public. Although she died, of leukaemia, in 1948 her books later became widely-read at a time of heightened interest due to the counter-culture and modernist disruption of traditional religious and scientific belief systems.
Her observations are drawn from her personal experience of the sector of British society in which vegetarian practice was most common - the lunatic fringe.

       "The question of diet also requires to be considered in this connection. The widespread propaganda of the Theosophical Society has caused vegetarianism to be regarded as a sine qua non of occult training. This, however, is not the case. The Western Esoteric Tradition does not make vegetarianism any part of its  system, but teaches that a man should partake sparingly and temperately of the food of the land in which  he finds himself. Personally I am inclined to think that occultism and vegetarianism are apt to be an injudicious mixture for a European, the result being a hyper-sensitiveness that makes life very difficult in our hard-driving civilisation.

      Vegetarianism has to be thoroughly understood and exceedingly well done if it is to be successful, and even so, there is a goodly proportion of people who are incapable of digesting vegetable proteins, which are not nearly so easily dealt with as animal substances. Nothing but experience and experimentation can show whether a vegetarian diet suits a given person. Indigestion is not the only indication that all is not well. Loss of appetite, loss of energy, loss of weight, or a flabby stoutness are all danger signals which if disregarded will cause chronic ill-health.        Vegetarianism may agree with a person well enough at first, but after a considerable period, possibly years, they may find that they are becoming subject to neuritis, neuralgia, sciatica, or one or another of the nerve pains. This is a sure indication that a vegetarian diet is affording insufficient nourishment, not because it does not contain the necessary food units, but because the digestion is unable to assimilate them and they are passing out of the body unchanged. Wherever there is a history of neuralgic pains complicating a case of psychic disturbance, I should be inclined to suspect chronic malnutrition as the cause of a hypertrophied psychism. In such cases it will probably be found that a gradual return to a nourishing mixed diet will bring about a reduction of the hyper-sensitiveness, the undesirable contacts that have been formed will fade, and the condition return to normal. The change of diet, however, should always be made gradually lest the digestion be upset." 

Yes, but, what will you do when the Covid comes?

This post was originally published on Patreon. You don't have encourage the speculations of the likes of me, but if you want to try, please subscribe!   Every day on NZ twitter people are debating what they would do were they the Government about vaccine roll-outs, MIQ, lockdowns, DJ's, and any other thing they can think of that they have absolutely no influence over.

Maybe, like me, you're double-chipped, using the app, wearing the mask, and annoying AF. Maybe you're even boostered up the wazoo. Well done. But y'know what? You're probably going to catch covid. Even if you don't, someone you care about is going to, even if you no longer care about the unvaccinated except as targets of your spite.

And yet, what no-one is talking about, or better yet arguing about in order to straighten out, is what they're doing now to reduce their risk of taking up hospital space when that happens, and what they're going to do to make themselves feel better once they get sick.

The good news is that the symptoms of Omicron are basically flu symptoms - scratchy throat, muscle ache, fatigue, night sweats, no loss of smell of taste. These, apart from the cough, were basically the second shot vax effects for many people. And even for those hospitalised, the average stay is 4 days vs 8 days with Delta. But why go to hospital at all if you can help it? Some people - morons, mostly - posit a false dichotomy between government policy and personal responsibility. But in every area, these are on completely different planes and complement each other. You taking responsibility for your health eases the pressure on a government trying to help those unfortunates who can't or won't.

So without further ado, as they say in places where there is an oversupply of further ado, here are the things I do.

Firstly, I exercise regularly and keep the sugar, seed oil, and refined starch real low; another way of saying this is that I eat whole food (of the cheapest sort, e.g. eggs, mince, the fruit and vege in season), play frisbee or swim every day, and walk the dog. I get as much sun as I can handle, and will take vitamin D in winter, or after a while during the prolonged cloudy weather typical of much of NZ.

Secondly, I eat a little sauerkraut or yoghurt with my meals, or take a cheap probiotic.

Thirdly, I take some supplements - Clinicians Selenium drops (Sodium Selenite), around 150 mcgs (three drops) a day, and x4 if I think I'm coming down with an RNA virus. This works out at around $17 a year. The cheapest Zinc tabs from chemist warehouse, one a day, but mostly when exposure is likely.  The cheapest chelated magnesium in the supermarket, 150 mg, most days (but I was taking this already).

If I get sick or obviously exposed, I'll increase the selenium drops to 300mcg 2x daily and take Sanderson's ViraMax, a mixture of elderberry (great, works for flu), echinacea, (great, works for cold), olive leaf extract (olive leaf extract has never worked for me, ever), and andrographis (works very well for all viral respiratory infections, but has a rare side-effect risk of liver damage, probably in people with compromised antioxidant defenses). When I had the RSV last year this combo eliminated symptoms so quickly I wondered if I'd just imagined coughing, sneezing and snotting all over the place on the first day.

Maybe you have different ideas? Please discuss them here or in a public forum. More:
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/readingroom/book-of-the-week-will-salad-cure-covid

My review of selenium, probiotics and vitamin D for COVID-19, meat for mental health, and LCHF for diabetes reversal in MSM

Greetings readers!

Every so often I am asked to review new or best-selling books related to diet for Newsroom and am encouraged by the Reading Room editor Steve Braunias, a very fine writer indeed, not to hold back.

Here's my "review" of two books on vegetables, which is mostly on the role of selenium, probiotics, and vitamin D in the Covid pandemic, as well as the value of meat in the preservation of mental health, and the promise of LCHF, keto and fasting diets for type 2 diabetes remission.

The more clicks and readers it gets, the more chance I'll have of presenting these types of ideas in mainstream media forums in future.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/readingroom/book-of-the-week-will-salad-cure-covid

The Mother of all Conspiracies; Oswald and JFK in the 21st Century.

 

Imagine a counterfactual America, an alternative history wherein it has always been a well-known and accepted fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-wolf Marxist, had assassinated the President of the United States for rational Marxist reasons as well as subterranean personal ones. In this America, a school shooting by a paranoid vegan only encourages logical and evidence-based discussion of gun control and mental illness, a terror attack by Islamist hijackers is unanimously attributed to its obvious perpetrators, the Moon is American, and one cannot simply say that one has won an election which one has lost. It is an America in which Dr Fauci can sleep easy, and in which, sometimes, a virus is only a virus.
There were conspiracy theorists before JFK of course, indeed Oswald had tried to kill one of them, General Edwin Walker, the only human target he missed putting one or more bullets into. Yet the creative JFK theories have had a wider appeal across American society than the paranoic blend of European antisemitism and John Birch anti-communism indulged in by Walker and his contemporaries. Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, tried to have Walker committed after he incited the Mississippi University race riots in 1962, but libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, opposed to the coercive psychiatry that was, to be fair, something of a public menace at the time, talked him out of it. Most people knew Walker was nuts. But with JFK theory you can stay respectable enough, it’s a hobby that seems to hurt no-one. You can put your own choice of villain in the frame – the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, LBJ, the military-industrial complex, and of course the Cubans or the KGB, though it’s strange that the Manchurian Candidate option presented in film before the assassination – because it seemed believable at the time – hasn’t survived in the modern myth, which is comprised of scenarios entirely discordant with Oswald’s personal beliefs.

We know what Oswald’s political beliefs were because he wrote them down, and expressed them relatively freely to those around him, and we know how he wanted to express those beliefs because we have a reliable witness to his development as an assassin, Marina Oswald, née Prusakova, whom he married in Minsk during his defection to the USSR. A year after Lee’s death, Marina spent several months with Priscilla MacMillan, author of Khrushchev and the Arts; the Politics of Soviet Culture 1962-1964. (MacMillan, a friend of Kennedy’s, had also interviewed Lee Oswald during his defection to the USSR, at which time he told her “I want to give the people of the United States something to think about” - she was the only person to know both the assassin and his victim). The book that resulted, Marina and Lee, did not appear till 1977.
Marina Prusakova, who was not told her father’s identity but came to assume he had died in a purge, and who was rejected by her mother and step-father, was raised for a time by her devout grandmother in an Old Regime style. She had sensibly decided, from her observations of Soviet life growing up, that politics was a sickness and that anyone interested in politics was sick, but she made a fateful exception for the young American who was interested in her. Marina may not have been “political” but she knew a thing or two, as this statement to a Warren Commission interviewer shows:

I look at America. It’s all wonderful. But you go to the damn grocery store and it’s 200 varieties of cereal and basically it’s only oats, corn – how many things? Just so someone can make an extra million off of that. It’s just so unnecessary. If that’s progress, if that’s abundance, how stupid is it of us to want it? Three hundred bags of poison, maybe only two or three good – that kind of progress…I don’t think we should strive for.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s solitary Marxism was the ideology that allowed an intelligent young man to compensate for the loss of his father and an upbringing by one of history’s more blameable mothers. It provided him with inspiration for grandiose fantasies and daring acts, as well as a feeling of intellectual importance that compensated for learning difficulties, diagnosed posthumously as dyslexia. Oswald had become seriously interested in politics at the age of 15 or 16 after he was handed a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed some two years earlier for spying for the Soviet Union, on a street corner in the Bronx (the effect this interaction had on him may have influenced his later decision to hand out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets in New Orleans; it seems to have also triggered a Walter Mitty fantasy life as an espionage hero which lasted the rest of his life). “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature,” Oswald wrote in his diary. “I had to dig for my books in the back of dusty shelves of libraries,” although according to Priscilla McMillan, he came across more as the naïve angry young man than a perceptive Marxist in their 5-hour Moscow interview despite using “a good deal of Marxist language”. The Oswald that stalks the pages of Marina and Lee is also a familiar character to readers of criminal profiling books, a case-study of the violent malcontent male loner. An American outsider who married a Russian outsider, and who was closer to Russian-speaking outsiders than to anyone else outside his family back in the USA, Lee Oswald read Orwell and Dostoyevsky, listened to Rimsky-Korsakoff, Chaliapin, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky, and in his more constructive activities was inspired by Marxist newspapers The Worker and The Militant. He is holding copies of both these papers in the famous photographs Marina took of him with his guns, one of which, with a Russian inscription on the back – “hunter of fascists – ha ha ha!” in Marina’s hand, signed by Oswald, was given to their friend George De Mohrenschildt, the edgelord of the Dallas Russian émigré scene who parodies an éminence grise role in their story. The Worker was the paper of the U.S. Communist Party, The Militant of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party; Oswald corresponded with both journals, in a futile attempt to establish credibility as a leader of the organized left; the March 11 1963 copy of The Militant he is holding contains a letter headed “News and Views from Dallas”, signed LH, which was the high point of his association with organised socialism in America.



Lee Oswald was a person who would lie or withhold the truth whenever possible, so that he moved in a web of misdirection, but also presumably in a state of tension lest his lies (which include a long list of needless lies on official forms) be found out. He starved himself and Marina, as his mother had starved him, and pinched pennies as she had - what conspiracy asset would have been left as bereft of financial support as the Oswalds were at times, or as dependent on the kindness of strangers, who liked Marina but rarely liked ungrateful and ungracious Lee, and sometimes feared him? He was violent and controlling towards Marina, and beat her often, but became less violent at home after his attempted assassination of General Walker altered their relationship; he was also often cruel to her, as if practicing the heartlessness essential in a great revolutionary leader, and prevented her learning English for his own reasons (so that much of the evidence in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald is the record of conversations held in Russian, remembered by someone who thought in Russian). Yet Lee, who identified as a Marxist, was never a member of the Communist party, and recognised that the USSR was less successful than the USA – his core attitude was a juvenile delinquent’s hostility to any authority he was no longer capable of idealising, and a contempt for almost all other people, but as a strongly self-entitled person of progressive views he granted, in theory, everyone else a share in what he himself felt he deserved. As a social justice warrior, he was capable of admirable performative gestures, such as sitting in the black section of a segregated courtroom when arraigned in New Orleans, without seemingly ever going out of his way to perform any act of kindness for another human being in need.

There is a Jekyll and Hyde character to Lee’s politics, in which his violent acts contradict both his written statements and his progressive activism, resembling an expressionistic caricature of 20^th century Marxism. Eleven years after his murder of Joseph P. Kennedy’s son, the Symbionese Liberation Army, collectivist Marxists with better childhoods and higher education than Oswald, embarked on a crime spree which included kidnapping the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. Their goals, motivations and grievances were, though filtered through the kaleidoscope of LSD, aligned with Oswald’s. Both Oswald and the SLA were influenced by what Elizabeth Converse, in The War of All Against All, called “the irrational Communist belief in ultimate world victory”. At its most extreme, this belief encouraged the accelerationist heresy - the belief that as Communism was inevitable, historical upheavals within Capitalist societies brought it closer, the worse the better. The accelerationist Marxist thinks like the addict who overdoses because the sooner they reach rock bottom, the sooner they can begin recovery. Thus the Communists of Weimar Germany were taught to welcome the rise of Hitler and call the liberal democrats who opposed him “fascists”, thus Posades welcomed the possibilities of nuclear war and alien invasion, thus the apocryphal Bernie bro voted for Trump. Sigmund Freud gave us the concept of Thanatos. the organism’s compulsive drive toward dissolution back into the world; Oswald’s decisions were often thanatic – his defection to the USSR, which involved cutting his left wrist and attempting to surrender his US citizenship, his assault on the Soviet bureaucracy to get both himself and Marina back to America, the time he shot at Walker, the time he stuck a pistol in his belt and said he was going to “have a look” at Richard Nixon (defused by Marina), the similarly defused planning to hijack an airliner to Cuba, the assassination itself, his refusal to consider that he might become a target afterwards.

On the morning of the 22^nd of November 1963, Lee Oswald left $170 for Marina, whom he had, up to that point seldom allowed any cash at all, as well as the wedding ring he never took off, collected his rifle, and went to work at the Elm street branch of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. There, from a window on the East side of the fifth floor, he shot dead U.S. President John F. Kennedy and wounded John Connally, the Governor of Texas; later that day Lee Oswald would kill Patrolman J.D. Tippit with the cut-off Smith and Weston .38 pistol he had mail-ordered long before the rifle, but which had arrived on the same day.
Had Lee Oswald stood trial, his guilt would have been presented as a coherent narrative, and his motivations widely discussed, as he intended. Instead, he was shot dead two days later by Jack Ruby in an act almost as impulsive and last-minute as his own. Ruby’s motives are obscure – even more unstable and violent than Oswald, he was a heavy consumer of phenmetrazine, the new amphetamine also popular with The Beatles, was only 5 blocks from the assassination when it happened, and became paranoid that Jews would be blamed for the assassination, resulting in a pogrom.

The original complaint filed by the Dallas police department on Lee Oswald, around midnight on the 22nd of November, said that Lee Oswald did, "in furtherance of an international communist conspiracy, assassinate President John F. Kennedy,” but Oswald’s murder, and the lack of evidence against anyone else he knew, meant that charge would not be tested in a court of law.


The possibility that Oswald's political convictions may have played a decisive part in his shooting John F. Kennedy was down-played in the early 1960s because President Johnson and other officials did not want the assassination to become a casus belli with the Soviet Union. And to the public, this explanation, at a moment when capitalism was riding high, appeared ludicrous. Besides, for a Marxist, killing this president appeared wildly inconsistent. Kennedy was a liberal.
- Priscilla MacMillan, JFK and Oswald: The Inconvenient Truth

It may have also have mattered that no-one wanted to revisit McCarthyism. Sen Joseph McCarthy had been defeated by censure in 1954 and died in 1957; the House Unamerican Activities Committee lingered until 1975 but by 1963 was beginning to come under siege from an emerging counterculture that would become increasingly Marxist as the 60’s turned to the 1970’s. Overseas, US foreign policy and covert interventions would ensure the abduction, torture and death of many thousands of Marxists through the next few decades, yet in the USA the few leftists who knew Oswald were not persecuted, and the journals of which he said "you can see what they want you to do by reading between the lines" were not supressed.

In December of 1963 Dylan, then in the most activist stage of his folk career, was an attendee at a dinner event in New York hosted by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had awarded him its annual Tom Paine Award.

“I’ve got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot.”

The outraged crowd then expressed its hostility to the speaker.

“You can boo but booing’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a — I just a — I’ve got to tell you, man, its Bill of Rights is free speech and I just want to admit that I accept this Tom Paine Award in behalf of James Forman of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and on behalf of the people who went to Cuba.”

 

Fair play for Cuba.

Perhaps the first conspiracy theory about the assassination, after the statement of the Dallas PD, was held covertly – the branch of the CIA working on mind control research must logically have begun looking for evidence of a “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing of Oswald by the KGB. The MKULTRA program, initiated in 1953, had failed to find any reliable form of brainwashing – they had been able to produce “vegetables” among their guinea pigs but not effective agents or reliable informants. The program’s budget would be reduced in 1964, but if there was the possibility that the Soviets or Cubans had succeeded in brainwashing Oswald then it could be kept alive, and perhaps vindicated. It was probably in this spirit that MKULTRA researcher Louis Jolyon West interviewed Jack Ruby in 1964, likely with the use of hypnosis and sodium pentothal. During the visit Ruby experienced a “psychotic break”, revisiting his delusion of a Kennedy-assassination inspired pogrom. Jolyon West, who killed the elephant Tusko with LSD and other drugs in 1962 and studied hippies with MKULTRA in Haight-Ashbury in late 1967, would later testify at the trial of temporary Marxist Patty Hearst in support of her defence’s brainwashing theory.

As Jolyon West was infiltrating the hippie subculture in search of the mind-control McGuffin, David Crosby was ending his career in The Byrds on stage at the Monterey Pop festival, by introducing the song He Was a Friend of Mine, a tribute to JFK, with a categorical statement of the most enduring of the JFK theories –

 

When President Kennedy was killed, he was not killed by one man. He was shot from a number of different directions — by different guns. The story has been suppressed, witnesses have been killed, and this is your country.

This moment marks the overground advent of progressive conspiracy theory, with its roots in Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex warning, and its motivation in opposition to the Vietnam war, and more to the point, in opposition to the drafting of young American men, who naturally adapted conspiracy theory as a defence against the mass disposal of their minds and bodies by the State – analogous to the adoption of conspiracy theory defences today by those whose autonomy and future plans have been threatened by their conscription in the war against COVID-19. It was widely rumoured that LBJ, Kennedy’s Vice President and successor, under whom America had become most stickily entangled in Vietnam, had ordered the hit, but Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were about to show the USA, and the world, how real political conspiracies are constructed.

It was in this environment of renewed conspiracy ferment that Kerry Thornley, who had known Oswald in the US Marines and written a book inspired by his personality, The Idle Warriors, before the assassination, initiated Operation Mindfuck, with the help of Greg Hill, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Operation Mindfuck introduced the Illuminati, through letters and ads in Playboy and other “hip” publications, to the US counterculture, with the intent of parodying the counterculture conspiracy industry and serving up an anti-stupidity vaccine with a side-order of chaos and fun. But Thornley and his accomplices underestimated the forces they were toying with, especially the human tendency to believe in malign machinations that can explain one’s own apparent impotence, dehumanise those in control, and undermine the achievements of those who have succeeded in one’s place, the same need to feel one’s weakness justified as cursed and, if one can do nothing worse, curse back that fed the belief in witchcraft in the Middle Ages and that in modern Africa.
While the Jews and Freemasons theories of the Right did not go away, they were quaintly old-fashioned and smelled strongly of old library books by the 1970’s, unable to keep up with the actual conspiracies and political and cultural developments of the Nixon-Kissinger period. The Satanic Abuse panic of the 80’s-90’s was the most successful attempt to upgrade them – arguably this succeeded, to the extent that it disrupted civil society, because it aligned with Marxist Feminist agitation against sexual exploitation; sexual Satanism was a predictable manifestation of the Patriarchy, and vice versa. Meanwhile, Hunter S Thompson had created new myths of the operation Mindfuck type, giving adrenochrome its backstory and planting a rumour about senator Eugene Muskie, the less-progressive Democratic candidate for the 1972 Presidential race, being high on ibogaine, which destroyed his candidacy. Kenny Thornley, instead of mocking the operation Mindfuck theories – which he, glimpsing the truth about Oswald, had started - began acting as if he believed in one or the other or all of them. And a young Oliver Stone, after serving in Vietnam and disapproving of the whole thing, began thinking about the assassination of JFK, who was believed posthumously to have been opposed to the War in some way.
Stone’s 1991 film JFK marks the moment when conspiracy theory passed over from the counterculture and far-right into the mainstream; it featured an impressive cast of A-list actors who presumably approved of its message of suspicion. JFK was followed by The X-Files TV series in 1993, with its telling slogan “I want to believe”. The X-Files was ironic enough, unlike Stone’s breathless film, but this didn’t inhibit the mass distribution and discussion of its ideas. Both JFK and The X-Files posit an all-powerful, yet successfully concealed Deep State for which the elected US government is window-dressing and easily removed if it objects. All around the world, this gave an easy explanation to those who resented US cultural hegemony and military power but were not the type to organise against them. It helped that it was a seemingly playful explanation, one that didn’t insist on being taken seriously enough to really test, even as it established itself in the zeitgeist.
Prior to 2001 the Deep State conspiracy theories had to co-exist with the rest of the Fortean world represented in The X-Files. UFOs, Bigfoot, spontaneous combustion, the Bermuda triangle, vampires - by the end of the 20^th century, several different species of UFO-riding aliens were abducting and probing people all around the world. But after 9/11, Islamist terrorists became the aliens and monsters we watched out for and it was the US state that began abducting and probing people everywhere; reports of UFO sightings and alien abductions went into serious decline. As the plainly venal team of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld openly conspired to roll back freedoms and push the world into another unwinnable war, a spontaneous conspiracy of sorts arose to undermine their casus belli by suggesting that the terror attacks had been an inside job. This also meant not admitting that a Saudi Arabian NGO could get the better of the mighty USA, so it had cross-party appeal, but the list of progressive celebrities who endorsed or indulged 9/11 conspiracy theories is almost as impressive as the cast of JFK, and included Ed Asner, Spike Lee, Woody Harrelson, Rosie O’Donnell, Marion Cottillard and Graham Nash. Spreading a rumour like “Bush did 9/11” is a way of cursing the powerful, a displacement activity born of impotence and frustration, like spreading a rumour that your local feudal tyrant worships Bahomet because you are powerless to stop him taking what he wants from you. And 20 years later, Q-Anon is simply the aggregate of all the progressive counterculture conspiracy theories, including Kerry Thornley and Hunter S Thompson’s inventions, with a modified Satanic abuse element, and with the older Jews, Freemasons and Communists theories always sneaking back in.

It all began with Oswald and the trauma he induced in the USA on November 22 1963. As NBC News anchor David Brinkley said, as he signed off that night, Kennedy’s death was “just too much, too ugly and too fast.” In 2007 Priscilla MacMillan summed up the aftermath of the assassination in a short article for World Policy Journal titled JFK and Oswald: The Inconvenient Truth.

 Oswald's act of violence indisputably ushered in an era of unease and suspicion in American life that was not there prior to the Kennedy assassination. Oswald was not responsible for all of the damage that has befallen American society since 1963, much as he would have wished to be. Some of that damage is the result of events related only tangentially to the assassination of President Kennedy. But some of the injury can, with justice, be attributed to conspiracy theorists who have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth. They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious "conspirators," and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy's successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald - with the most terrible of intentions - was able to do.

Kerry Thornley thought that a little light Illuminati hoaxing would make people immune to conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories, as The X-Files and its spin-off The Lone Gunmen have proved, are immune to spoofing; Q-Anon is a spoof of spoofs, and it has outshone them all.

If the world is ready to give Marina Oswald’s story and Priscilla MacMillan’s research and analysis the same attention it once gave to Jim Garrison’s speculations, narrative will replace montage in the JFK storytelling tradition. In the near future there will be a film, or better yet a TV series, of Marina and Lee, based on the True Crime book of that name which its viewers will queue to read. In our contemporary state of disinformation hypersensitivity, it should get a more reasoned reception from the comments section than the PBS Frontline documentary series Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald did when it rescreened in 2013. We will come to understand Lee Oswald and the ideological world he inhabited, which is closer to our own than used to be the case, because the expression of low-constraint or heretical or otherwise deviationist versions of Marxist ideas is now commonplace, because glasnost revisionism, 90 Day Fiancé, RT, and Red Scare have made Marina’s voice more relatable, and because we’re now well-used to seeing violent malcontent male loners acting out the terrorist fantasies which they developed through ideological study and travel.

Imagine a counterfactual America, an alternative history wherein it has always been a well-known and accepted fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-wolf Marxist, assassinated the 35^th President of the United States.



George Henderson, Auckland, Sept 2021

Addendum:
The killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby was the real singularity that tipped America down the path to Q-Anon, as it removed Oswald from his own story. I've called Ruby's motives "obscure" above, but obscure as they are they are not beyond all speculation. Here's what I think.

Roy Cohn, as a patriotic American Jew trying to succeed in the system, persecuted Jewish American communists because he thought they gave a bad impression of American Jews - he more-or-less framed Ethel Rosenberg and brought about her execution. This was the injustice that led to the radicalization of the young Oswald.
The Dallas newspapers had been carrying adverts against JFK that in the opinion of many at the time amounted to hate speech, and some of these were signed by Jewish Republicans (the Republican party still being the old party of tolerance for many, I suppose). Ruby was concerned about this even before the shooting, and when he heard about it panicked that the Jews would be blamed for killing JFK (as, I suppose, they had been for killing Christ) and was compelled to kill Oswald to clear their name, as a kind of sacrificial lamb for his people.
Because this involved magical thinking, and because he may have found it embarrassing in his lucid moments, Ruby gave the more innocent explanation that he had killed Oswald to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of a trial.
Roy Cohn would go on to become the mentor of Donald Trump, and Donald Trump would go on to become the patron and beneficiary of Q-Anon.