Sometimes they really are doing germ warfare tests on you

On being sacrificed for the greater good

My favourite conspiracy theory that’s true is how the British government secretly conducted germ warfare tests on unwitting citizens.

From the 1940s to the early 1980s, dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms were released on vast swaths of the British population.

Intended to recreate a possible Soviet attack, millions of people were subjected to chemical attacks coordinated by British scientists and launched from military airplanes, ships and trucks around the country.

Some examples include the spraying of bacteria including e.coli and bacillus globigii over a five to 10-mile radius by a military ship anchored off the south coast of England for seven years.

Another experiment which went on for nearly 20 years saw planes criss-crossing England, flying from the north-east of the country to the tip of Cornwall dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide – a known carcinogen – on the population.

Another experiment in the 70s involved UK and US military jets spraying massive quantities of serratia marcescens bacteria, with an anthrax simulant and phenol, over the south coast.

Later on, searching for a tropical environment to carry out field trials, British scientists spent 15 months dispersing large quantities of experimental nerve agents in villages around colonial southern Nigeria. The impact of these tests has never been examined.

After the British government had used its population as a giant laboratory for chemical warfare testing, clusters of birth defects began to emerge. In East Lulworth, a village in the heavily-targeted southern county of Dorset, every single female of the 22 families that lived there went on to have miscarriages or give birth to children with defects.

This story should remind us that scientists and politicians are capable of any moral perversion at any scale if they have convinced themselves they are servicing the greater good.

It should demonstrate that science and scientists are two separate things.

One is a neutral body of exploration and knowledge. The other is the undertaking of this exploration and expression of this knowledge by individuals operating in highly contingent environments shaped by morality, social norms, power structures, ideologies and cognitive biases.

In the geo-political context of fighting a cold war and preparing for a hot one, the scientists that oversaw these experiments will have intellectualised away the harm as necessary for an imagined greater good.

This should be no surprise. History is littered with murderers and architects of mass death whose advanced qualifications and intellectual prowess were harnessed to advance ruling class concepts of the greater good.

Nazi doctors and scientists are an obvious example, men who undertook the most vile and repulsive experiments on people. They were highly credential, so much so that the United States hired some of them to carry on their work rather than put them on trial, in one of history’s most twisted examples of game recognise game.

And sometimes, the greater good overlaps with financial profit, the most expedient of all justifications for mass death.

As the building and industrialisation boom took off in the US in the early 20th century, the US government began noticing that those who worked with asbestos products were dying younger and at higher rates. But the industry was booming, a country was being built, and the material was needed for the greater good. So to ensure nothing as trivial as mass death would get in their way, the manufacturers initiated a cover-up, even as their own scientists were producing report after report detailing the harms. But these scientists on the payroll of the industry stayed quiet, and the companies paid off local and national politicians. Which meant that for decades, infrastructure across the world continued to be outfitted with a known carcinogen. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the body count became embarrassing and families demanded justice, that action was finally taken.

Today, more than one hundred years after it was known to kill, asbestos exposure remains the number one cause of work-related deaths in the world, killing about 240,000 people every year.

Of course the poster boy for the health scandal that was hidden in plain sight for decades is tobacco and smoking. The coverup was extensive and at a massive scale, involving scientists, doctors, marketing agencies, film stars and government officials. Smoking today kills 8 million people a year.

And what have we done to punish the companies whose products still kill so many and cause untold suffering to so many more? We told them to please put some graphic pictures on their packaging. The case for a ban and criminal trials seems clear. But no such thing can be permitted. The conflict between science and capitalism is too stark.

The second half of the 20th century was full of these types of scandals and cover-ups. Lead in paint and in fuel was another. The dangers of lead have been known for hundreds of years, yet they kept poisoning babies with it until the 1990s because it was profitable and useful. The devastation wrought on babies by the drug thalidomide was another cover-up by capitalists.

So if you look around today at the unfettered spread of covid and unfolding climate chaos and think maybe it isn’t that bad. If you wonder whether you’re being overly paranoid, history is here to tell you you’re not.

You are healthily sceptical.

You can spot a charlatan.

You know what is valued and what is not.

And you refuse to be deaf to the echoes of the past.

Covid and climate are our germ warfare tests, our asbestos.

Our 21st century cover-ups hiding in plain sight.

You don’t have to believe in ‘chem trails’ to know that sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction.

That the accommodation between science and capitalism can be uneasy at best.

That when they clash, things can quickly tip away from the science.

That the most credentialed of experts can have a loyalty to the system that comes before anything else.

Mass infection with a pathogen that will now kill millions each year was promoted by hundreds of experts including medical doctors as necessary for the greater good. Because to control it would place too high a burden on capitalism. And as capitalism is the system we all live under, logically it must be unencumbered for the greatest good to flow.

Oil companies hired scientists to produce false reports that said burning fossil fuels didn’t warm the climate and were essential to prosperity. And as fossil fuels power the system we live under, logically they too must face no barriers if the greatest good is to be serviced. And here we are, deep in a climate crisis with fossil fuel burning hitting new highs every year.

These scandals continue a grand tradition of imposing notions of the greater good onto populations at large without our consent.

It could almost be industrial capitalism’s slogan:

Mass death. For the greater good.

(artwork by @ronniefurbear on instagram)