Viva Mark Wainberg, Champion of the Dissident Cause

If websites could gather dust, then the sterile pages of aidstruth.org would be buried in it. This is the Scientific Establishment's answer to the burgeoning, thriving, growing, buzzing international online Aids Dissident / Rethinker / Realist / Anarchist community. Like the papal bulls of bygone centuries, this collection of quasi-religious dogma lies shrouded in its digital, crypt-like sanctity.

It is in the very existence of this site that we ironically find reflected the growing strength of the Dissident Movement, made possible by the uncensorable internet. If the Dissidents were really "discredited", "crackpots", "the loony fringe", as the public at large has thus far been led to believe, then what need is there to answer them at all, or bother oneself about them? Yet look at all the trouble the Establishment is going to: with Hamlet, we might remark, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks..."

It has always been a tenet of the Orthodoxy that the Dissidents are not to be engaged in open debate. This has always struck me as peculiar, as Science, with its perpetual subsuming of hypothesis into broader hypothesis, is all about debate - debate is its lifeblood! Yet at aidstruth.org we find the imperious declaration renewed: "We will not engage in any public or private debate with Aids denialists, or respond to requests of journalists who overtly support Aids denialist causes".

Have we crossed some invisible line in space and time where a scientific hypothesis became above scrutiny? What is there now to distinguish the doctrine of Aids from the dear old doctrines of the church, with their dogmas and their a prioris? There is indeed something rotten in the State of Denmark, and an unpleasant odour is slowly oozing from valley to valley, to the farthest corners of the globe...

The political decadence of the Aids establishment is manifest in the lack in its proponents of sufficient fibre to carry thro what they originally vowed to do: not to dignify the Dissidents with a response. Leading the avant garde in the ill-advised charge to wage pre-emptive war on the lunatic fringe, sabre drawn, is prominent Canadian Aids bigwig Mark Wainberg. Mr Wainberg has famously and repeatedly called for the jailing of Dissidents, and the censoring of their ideas. Unwittingly, he is doing the once monolithic, irreproachable, unassailable edifice of Aids Authority he wishes to defend, immeasurable harm. He is shaming the very name of Science. Had he been a priest, we might understand his calls to confine the heretics in dank cells, and silence their voices; yet he is supposedly a man of science, a man who worships empirical Truth - Truth which is unassailable, which no number of lies can ever overwhelm. 2 + 2 = 4 will always be true, whatever you may say to the contrary. But the emotion, the frenzy, the sheer vituperation smack of something more, something altogether different, in the motives of Wainberg and the others like him.

In his overly-shrill rantings, Mr Wainberg is bringing attention to the Dissident case by his very denial of it - he is feeding the very fire that he so evidently fears will engulf him. It is not hard to understand - after all the years of sated opulence, of high position, of unparalleled prestige, of being hailed as a Crusader, a Seer, how utterly, hideously unthinkable that it may come to light that your reputation is based on nought, and your good works have been nothing but a blight on humanity. To be hauled before a once-worshipping public as a greater charlatan - or rather a greater fool, because you apparently believed it all yourself - than the worst snake-oil salesman that ever lived, this must be the theme of the secret, Freudian nightmares from which you wake up sweating at night.

Let the Dissidents then toast the good health of Mr Wainberg, and hope that his vigour and his drive in his crusade will not fail: he is giving a most welcome helping hand to those very ones he so avowedly wishes to crush.