August 11, 1999 - "In the name of health!" In our atheistic society, this cry has replaced the more humble, and human, "in the name of God". The deity has changed, but the greed for control and the abuses perpetrated in its name have not.

In the name of health we kill liberties, allow lies, change political systems, and allow cons to call themselves scientists and have political balm. We maintain high levels of fear in the population with endless health scares, allow the vilification and persecution of millions, as in the case of smokers, where more and more often even medical care is denied to them.

Will it end? It will not. The health neo-fascists will not stop -- unless we stop them. Their so-called "health revolution" does not have a goal -- better yet, the goal is the generic and undefined "health for all" carrot that sounds so good and sells itself so well. Except that the carrot moves with the public jackass while skillfully being held on a stick by the health establishment. In the meantime resources are drained by immense "health" bureaucracies in a process that aggravates society so much, the only possible outcome is the abyss of political tyranny and financial collapse.

But this is not all. Now the health establishment wants to fiddle with the very building blocks of life, as this chilling article by BBC reports. Like children with a new toy, they can't wait to play with something they have barely begun to understand. But this toy is filled with TNT.

The purpose of genetic fiddling may sound noble, because for now it seems to deal only with the prevention of terrible diseases. But we can see what the health establishment can do with politics. When it became profitable to lie about tobacco, the persecution of millions of people was started, with such political, social and financial negative repercussions their enormous magnitude can be truly assessed only decades from now -- when all the perpetrators will be safely out of office.

If we give the health establishment the power to "make available" the prevention of "undesirable genetic features," it will only take the appropriate political propaganda by this already way too powerful establishment to "convince" the majority of people to "choose" any "feature elimination option" offered by technology. And as soon as those who choose those options get to be the majority, the voluntary nature of the "options" will be eliminated, while dissenters will be punished in a variety of ways -- in the name of public health and social order, of course.

Having the technology (or a "better way") to do things should not and must not compel anyone to use it. That is the nature of a truly free society. Yet we have seen compulsion over and over with safety belts, bicycle and motorcycle helmets, Medicare, and thousands of other examples -- and we "ain't" seen nothing yet!

In today's utterly deceptive political language, the word "option" has been quietly subjected to a political redefinition that is similar to what happened to the word "addiction," the meaning of which has become so broad, the word can now be applied to anything that is done more than twice in a row. Nowadays "optional" simply indicates a prelude to legislation that compels, just as words such as "health" and "safety" are now euphemisms to numb the awareness of a totalitarian state's iron grip. Euphemisms are the Vaseline used by oppressive politicians to lubricate the State's invasive apparatus.

As smokers, we are feeling the pain caused by that apparatus. Do you remember the introduction of smoking sections? The huge majority of smokers applauded the institution of those sections for (in retrospect) naive reasons of courtesy to non-smokers. Little did smokers know then that smoking sections were not the end of the issue, but the beginning of their social marginalization.

When you roll a small snowball down the mountainside, you know it becomes an avalanche. The wise man does not roll the snowball -- even if that makes his children cry with disappointment.

Today we can no longer delude ourselves about the state's "limited control". It makes as much sense as hoping that a cold will stop at our nostrils. With genetic screening, today we are talking about preventing disease. Tomorrow we'll talk about preventing more -- it is just a matter of establishing which label is to be applied to what.

Smoking, drinking, drugs, rebelliousness, curiosity, hyperactivity... anything can be labeled as a physical or mental "disease" worth "opting out of." And junk science will always be there to provide moral and political rationalizations. For the first time in human history, an entity such as the US Center for Disease Control has recently established that behaviour can be classified as a disease that warrants state intervention.

Ritalin was created to deal with extreme child hyperactivity. But in the immature and irresponsible hands of many pedagogues, today Ritalin is more and more used to chemically subdue "disruptive" vivacious, intelligent kids in schools so that the incompetent teacher can peacefully carry on with lessons where anti-smoking "education" has replaced much of the conventional education.

Those who laugh thinking that this is an exaggeration should remember a short time ago, when nobody would even conceive of forbidding smoking in parks, or taking away the children of smokers. And those who still call this health tyranny "progress" should stop being a bunch of self-delusional imbeciles lacking the guts to face what is crystal clear: the health establishment is well on its way to becoming THE political tyrant of tomorrow.

Genetics maybe vital for the elimination of the terrible diseases that still plague humanity, and for this reason alone research should be continued, and supported. But without very, VERY strict and limiting legislation in place BEFORE fiddling with genetics in a major way, we give the health establishment the power of life in a way that is frighteningly different than the power to save it.

As Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics (GB) warns:

"People hate to talk about Nazification of medicine, but this is actually what is happening. It took only 25 years in Germany to go from individual doctors saying there are certain lives not worth living, to having mass euthanasia programmes."

And we shouldn't fall for the reassurance of Ruth Deech, chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority who has, of course, the last word in the article:

"We are only too well aware of the sort of dangers that have been described, which is why we inch forward very carefully indeed with counselling for parents."

Sorry, that is simply not enough.

With respect to a relatively smaller issue, when smoking sections were instituted, we were all assured that "the rights of smokers will never be taken away, of course". And this assurance came from the same class of political and "health" gangs who now instigate non-smokers to perceive us as killers of our peers when we exercise our right to smoke. Junk science and propaganda have provided the justification for throwing us out of the doors of every public place -- even making it difficult for us to find a rental apartment. The dark logic of repression often escapes even those who have naively started it with honest intentions, and takes a life of its own.

But while anti-tobacco can, and eventually will, be pushed back into the sewers where it belongs, genetic alterations cannot be just rejected once in place, for the changes will be there forever -- and they will reproduce. Let us not allow the arrogance of the health establishment to make the final error, for it will be with us in perpetuity.

The wise man does not roll the snowball down the mountainside -- even if that makes his children cry with disappointment.

Gian Turci
FORCES INTERNATIONAL