Down With the World Health Organization!

Say what you want about Donald the Orange, the current President of the Yankee Republic, but he was absolutely right to cancel funding to the World Health Organization. There are a lot of people, of course, mostly of the type who have been suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome since at least November 2016, who do not see it that way. Captain Airhead, the cartoon character whom the Canadian electorate has foolishly put into office as Her Majesty’s Prime Minister for two consecutive Dominion elections, is jumping up and down in rage, blowing steam out of his ears, and frothing at the mouth in fury over it. This in itself is compelling and convincing evidence that Mr. Trump made the right decision.

The World Health Organization was founded in 1948 as the medical arm of the United Nations. Much like its parent organization, it has been in bed from its very beginning with both the totalitarian tyranny of Communism and the very sort of multinational corporations that give capitalism a bad name.

To give one recent example of its being in bed with Communism, only three years ago the WHO named Robert Mugabe its “Goodwill Ambassador.” Yes, that Robert Mugabe. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was known as “Comrade Bob”, this Communist bastard was one of the founders and eventually the leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), a terrorist organization backed by Red China that had split away from the Soviet backed Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) over opposition to the latter group’s leader Joshua Nkomo. These were the decades in which Rhodesia, as it was then called, was torn apart by a three way civil war between the two terrorist armies backed by the rival Communist superpowers and the white minority government led by Ian Smith. The civil war ended, largely because Western countries decided to throw Rhodesia under the bus, with an agreement to hold an election, in which Mugabe’s armed goons frightened everyone into voting him into power. He renamed the country Zimbabwe, ruled it as a brutal Communist dictator for thirty years, turned it from a self-supporting breadbasket into a land of poverty and famine, and murdered a whole lot of people. There was enough of an outcry over the appointment of this genocidal maniac that the WHO turned around and dropped him the next day, but the fact that they made the appointment in the first place speaks volumes.

Attention all progressives. The previous paragraph is your cue to cry “raaaaaccccciiiiissssst.”

The man who thought that Mugabe had just the sort of positive image that the WHO needed was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He had just been appointed Director-General of the WHO at the time and he is still in charge there today. Prior to his assuming the top WHO job he had served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Ethiopian government from 2012 to 2016, before which he had been Minister of Health from 2005 to 2012. During these years Ethiopia was governed by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The EPRDF, predecessor to the currently governing Prosperity Party that replaced it last year, was a coalition of Marxist parties representing different Ethiopian ethnic groups that governed the country since the fall of the overtly Communist regime propped up by the Soviet Union in 1991. It was itself only slightly less overtly Marxist-Leninist than that regime. Tedros Adhanom belonged to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which dominated the EPRDF and was the only member of the coalition not to join the new Prosperity Party when it was formed last year, and which can still be found in the University of Maryland’s database on Global Terrorism where the most recent terror attack attributed to it took place only two years ago. As Meles Zenawi Asres’ Minister of Health, his chief accomplishment was to cover up outbreaks of cholera in 2006, 2009, and 2011 by mislabeling them as “acute watery diarrhea” – one of the symptoms of the disease – and expelling the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and anybody else who could tell the world what was really going on. He had plenty of reason for doing so in that he was withholding medical treatment from ethnic groups his regime was persecuting. As Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, his duties involved imprisoning, torturing, and killing political dissidents and journalists who dared to report on the atrocities of the regime he served. That regime was brutal and genocidal, persecuting Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who were targeted for their religion, and various groups such as the Amhara people who had ruled Ethiopia prior to the Deng, Communist, and EPRDF regimes, the Oromo people of Oromia, and the Ogaden Somalis who were targeted for their ethnicity. Tedros Adhanom, in both of his ministerial capacities serving this regime, was complicit in all of this. No wonder he thought so highly of “Comrade Bob.” He is a monster cut from the same cloth.

As for the multinational corporations that give capitalism a bad name there are none worse than the big pharmaceutical companies. Even the much maligned big petroleum companies look like shining paragons of virtue compared with these guys. Since we all have plenty of spare time now, I recommend that you read the 2001 novel The Constant Gardener by retired British intelligence agent David Cornwell, writing under his pen name of John le Carré. Or, since the totalitarian control freaks have shut the libraries, you can watch the 2005 film version starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. As with his most famous novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was loosely based upon the Kim Philby affair, this novel, in which a British diplomat investigates the murder of his wife and ultimately traces it to a large German pharmaceutical company engaged in unethical medical testing in Africa, was inspired by real events. Cornwell himself, after giving a this-is-fiction disclaimer, said “But I can tell you this; as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."

The World Health Organization’s funds come from two sources. First, there are the contributions it requires from its member nations as a sort of membership fee. The largest such contribution has always come from the United States – until Donald the Orange cut them off last week. The second source is voluntary contributions, which can come either from governments, over and above their assessed contributions, or from private sources. The constitution of the World Health Organization prohibits it from accepting such donations directly from the pharmaceutical industry, but it can accept contributions from foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which have long been the intermediaries between the pharmaceutical companies and the WHO. Almost a decade ago, the WHO relied upon private donations for about a third of its budget. More recent estimates – and they are only estimates since the WHO has been considerably less than transparent about its funding since Tedros Adhanom became its Director-General - have placed that amount at just below fifty percent, although some have estimated that it is much higher than this, as much as eighty percent.

Those who think that there is some sort of conflict of interest between the WHO’s being in bed with totalitarian Communism and multinational pharmaceutical corporations at the same time have evidently forgotten that the Communist Manifesto was co-authored by a factory owner and that the Bolshevik Revolution was financed by Wall Street bankers. Now totalitarian Communism and corrupt capitalism at its worse have converged yet again in the WHO’s handling of the Wuhan Flu or, as it calls it, COVID-19.

The absurd, illogical, and unscientific strategy that most governments have taken to combatting this pandemic has been at the WHO’s recommendation. This strategy, in defiance of facts and common sense, involves an unprecedented universal quarantine, telling people to stay inside – where viruses of this sort are most easily spread – rather than going outside where viruses have a much harder time spreading from one person to another and where man’s two most important natural allies in the fight against infectious disease, sunlight and fresh air, are to be found. The “stay at home”, “social distancing”, “flatten the curve”, strategy creates conditions that mimic those which are typical of Communist countries – forced closure of churches, requirement of state permission to travel, line ups at grocery stores, shortages of essential goods, basic freedoms of religion, assembly, and association all severely curtailed, encouragement of snitching on neighbours, friends, and family, discouragement of family gatherings, special police forces charged with enforcing petty rules that are all against ordinary forms of behaviour that have now become mala prohibita rather than against true crimes which are mala in se, and the like. The WHO, and the governments that have been listening to it, say that such measures must be in place until there is a vaccine for the virus. An expensive vaccine is the pharmaceutical industry’s preferred solution to the pandemic, even though they have never been able to produce a vaccine for a coronavirus in the past. Bill Gates, who now that the United States has withdrawn would appear to be the single largest contributor to the WHO, has been funding research not only on such a vaccine but on technology for embedded vaccination records that would take health totalitarianism to a whole new level. One would almost think he was campaigning for the job of one of the beasts of the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse, except that he is too obvious a choice, resembling nothing so much as a villain from a James Bond movie escaped into real life.

Meanwhile, the evidence continues to accumulate as to Communist China’s culpability in this pandemic. Leaving aside the interesting question of whether this strain of noctilionine influenza jumped to humans through an intermediary at a wet market, as the Communist regime claims, or escaped from the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology where bats are experimented on and which is located a hop, skip, and a jump away from said wet market, it is known that the regime suppressed information about the initial outbreak, clamped down on whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang, lied about the evidence it already had in abundance for human-to-human transmission, and allowed international travel in and out of Hubei province where the outbreak began, long after it had closed it off to the rest of China. Throughout all of this, the WHO accepted everything the Chinese government told them as Gospel truth, praised the regime for its efforts to contain the disease, and condemned the idea of slapping travel restrictions on China when Donald the Orange first raised it in January. They continue to dance to China’s tune to this very day.

Did I mention that Red China had been Tedros Adhanom’s biggest supporter when he was seeking his current position at the WHO?

Yes, Donald the Orange is right to cut American funding to this hopeless corrupt and totalitarian organization. If only the rest of us would follow suit.

No Need to Apologize, Gary, You Got it Right the First Time!

At one time you would occasionally see a man wearing a T-shirt with the phrase “I read it for the articles”. The “it”, in question was Hugh Hefner’s men’s magazine, Playboy. The statement was a joke, intended to provoke, whether spoken or not, the response of “yeah, right you do”. For the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the name of that magazine, or sees its familiar rabbit’s head logo, is the photographs of nude models and celebrity actresses that have been its selling point since Marilyn Monroe’s appeared in their premier issue just under sixty years ago.

It was an amusing joke but I found it funny for entirely different reasons than the ones intended by those telling the joke. The only reason anybody would feel compelled to offer such a lame excuse for buying a girlie mag is societal and cultural disapproval of such erotica, which disapproval more or less vanished within the same decade the magazine was launched. What I find downright hilarious about it all is that it was the articles all along which were the most disgusting and evil thing about the magazine. It was in the articles that Hef’s morally corrosive message of sheer, self-serving, pleasure-seeking hedonism, i.e., “The Playboy philosophy” was preached, poisoning the souls and minds of those who read it. By comparison, the pictures were considerably more wholesome. “I only look at the pictures” should have been the more respectable thing to say.

I mention all of this because a recent Playboy interview has made the news and, judging from the content of the interview, the angry response it has received and from whom, this would appear to be the first article they have ran that was actually worth reading since their interview with William F. Buckley Jr.

The interviewee was British actor Gary Oldman. He is a well-known actor with whom it is probably safe to say most people are familiar. He first became famous with his portrayal of Sid Vicious, the bass guitarist of the Sex Pistols in a 1986 biographical film. At one time he was best known for playing bad guys, like Count Dracula in the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version of the story or the madman in Hannibal (2001) who made Dr. Lecter look sane and sympathetic by comparison. More recently he played Commissioner Gordon in the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films, took on a more Sirius role in the film versions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and put on a Smiley face to star in the film version of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He will next appear in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, scheduled to be released next month.

So what did Oldman say in this interview with Playboy's Contributing Editor David Hochman to twist so many people’s knickers up into knots and over which he has taken on the new, humiliating role, of self-debasing perpetual apologiser?

Towards the end of the interview, Oldman makes a remark about how he can understand why Mel Gibson would want to finance his own movies, leading the interviewer to prompt him further about this, at which point he goes off on a rant about political correctness, about how it is crap, and how people can’t take a joke anymore. Going back to Mel Gibson he says “I don’t know about Mel. He got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things.” Expanding upon that last remark, he questions whether the policeman who arrested Gibson has never used racial epithets, and says “It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.” He then defends Alec Baldwin over the incident where he called someone who was harassing him a “fag” before again returning to Mel Gibson and saying:

Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him—and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know? But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That fucking kraut” or “Fuck those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, “Isn’t that shocking?”

Shortly after this he tells Playboy that the interview has gone badly and that “You have to edit and cut half of what I’ve said, because it’s going to make me sound like a bigot” which, of course, they did not do.

Well, there you have it. The Anti-Defamation League immediately denounced Oldman’s remarks as “anti-Semitic.” It’s notorious director Abraham H. Foxman said “it is disturbing that Mr. Oldman appears to have bought into Mr. Gibson's warped and prejudiced world view” and Oldman wrote a grovelling open letter of apology to the ADL. Foxman’s response, predictably, was to say that it was not good enough. “At this point, we are not satisfied with what we received. His apology is insufficient and not satisfactory.” On Wednesday, Oldman appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to apologize yet again.

Well, listen up Abe Foxman and you listen up good. You did not deserve a single word of apology from Mr. Oldman because he had every right to say what he said, and moreover he was right in saying it. We all remember the incident in which Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and went into an anti-Semitic tirade. Some of us, remember what preceded that incident. Gibson’s arrest was in July of 2006. Two years previously he had released the movie The Passion of the Christ, a film that you, Foxman, had complained might spark “anti-Semitism” because its portrayal of events of Christ’s trial and crucifixion was true to the New Testament. Some of us also remember, Foxman, that your pogrom against Gibson began before you had ever seen the movie. The year before the film came out you went to Gibson expressing “concern” that the film might be anti-Semitic and then acted shocked when he turned down your request for an advanced viewing of the film. Oh, I am sure you were very polite and civil in your request. I’ve read your ex-post facto self-justifying account of how you “reached out” to Gibson. Look up the expression “concern troll” to see why I am not impressed. I also remember that at this same time Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, an ultra-traditionalist Catholic was being dragged through the mud in the press over his unconventional views of the Holocaust. Perhaps you expect us to believe you had nothing to do with that? Well I’m not about to buy your ocean front property in the middle of the desert either. Gibson, from his remarks to the press at the time, was clearly under the impression that somebody was putting pressure on him to denounce his father. It is not that difficult to put two and two together and come up with a pretty good idea as to who that might have been. To expect a man to turn on his own father to appease your wrath is the kind of arrogance for which I find the Greek word hubris to be insufficient. Lets call it chutzpah shall we?

When someone is put through all that nonsense it should not shock or surprise us if negative feelings towards the Jews start coming out when he gets drunk. Frankly, it would be more surprising if they didn’t. Oldman was absolutely right to come to Gibson’s defense and, rather than apologize, it would have been better if he had directed some of that colourful language he used in his interview in the direction of the Anti-Defamation League. For that is all that the ADL, which has for far too long gotten away with cloaking its bullying behaviour under the guise of “reaching out” and its Christophobia behind the mask of “tolerance”, deserves. As for what he said about who runs Hollywood, in its haste to evoke the old “old anti-Semitic canard” canard against Oldman, the ADL and its like-minded supporters perhaps failed to notice the lack of the definite article before “Jews.” Had Oldman said “in a town that’s run by the Jews” it might have been anti-Semitic, i.e., the idea that the ethnic group as a collective is in charge of Hollywood, but he said “in a town that’s run by Jews”, which merely suggests that the people in charge happen to be Jewish. In Hollywood, that is a basic and obvious fact. See Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood which, according to Oldman’s grovelling letter he has just been reading, or Ben Stein’s article of a few years back entitled “Do Jews Run Hollywood? You Bet They Do…And What of It?”

What a pity that Oldman did not stick to his guns when he was right all along.