Biopower and Security

Julian Vigo

In The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (L’histoire de la sexualité, La volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault defines biopower as the practices engaged by the modern state to effect an “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (184). Developing his notion of biopower through the many exegeses of disciplinary power he studies throughout his career, Foucault focuses his interpretations of biopower on various styles of governments which have historically devised myriad controls of the body—be it in the areas of public health creation and regulation, heath crises and quarantine, military education, the creation of the mental hospital, the structure of the modern prison or the public policies which evolve discourses of the body and discourses of power onto the body:

[I]t is focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (1976, 183)

Foucault suggests that the somatic, the individual body, is controlled as a means to dominating the general population. Maintaining that biopolitics were developed in the second half of the 18th century and were centered entirely on the body—its health, mortality and continuance—Foucault details this newly born power which has not replaced disciplinary power, but that was instead simply grafted onto disciplinary power, as he writes in “Society Must Be Defended” (Il faut défendre la société):
These are the phenomena that begin to be taken into account at the end of the eighteenth century, and they result in the development of a medicine whose main function will now be public hygiene, with institutions to coordinate medical care, centralize power, and normalize knowledge. And which also takes the form of campaigns to teach hygiene and to medicalize the population (1997, 217).

This distinction between biopower and disciplinary power is imperative to understand in moving forward through his various readings of power: Foucault reads disciplinary power as that which focusses upon people as individuals—subjects to train, teach, punish, surveil and utilize—whereas bio-power focuses on individuals as people—as a “species” to conglomerate, regulate, characterize, and ultimately forecast. Where disciplinary power focuses on particular individuals, Foucault sees biopower as that which focuses upon an extrapolated individual who can be serialized to the point of being interchangeable, repeatable and disappearable.

How does biopower function pragmatically and historically then? In an effort to bring Foucault to the everyday, which I strongly believe is a moral imperative inherent within his writings and life practices, I will mention briefly how biopower has manifested itself in recent history. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities outlines how in colonial Asia was literally amassed through the census: health programs which were established to regulate the population as a mass; the installation prenatal programs to influence birth rates; creation of the census to know the colonial population, and so forth. One of the effects of the British colonial census in Malaysia, for instance, was that the categories became more overtly and “exclusively racial” while religious identity was disappeared after the between the census of 1871 and 1901 while nationalities became “pseudoethnic subcategories,” such as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and so forth (164-165). Anderson notes the reifying violences of bio-power in the colonizer’s will to homogenize identity:

These “identities,” imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible. One notices in addition, the census makers’ passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence their intolerance of multiple, politically “transvestite,” blurred, or changing identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, under each racial group, of “Others”—who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to be confused with other “Others.” The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions. (165-166)

Similarly, these mechanisms of governmentality were deployed in the 19th and 20th centuries by imperialists in many African nation from the creation of the census, health programs, maps, to the “preservation” of the “African past” through the building of museums. Indeed, we see this kind of polemic cast upon the people who are inserted and removed from discourses of nationhood in Canada whereby people paradoxically called “First Nations,” the Inuit and Métis are conveniently inserted or made invisible within the greater playing field biopolitics such as the special dates when independence and nationhood are “celebrated”—be it Canada Day or La Fête “nationale” du Québec. Such celebrations of nationalism are en masse artificial consolidations of identity which conterminously elide those voices and bodies which challenge these quite fictional constructions of national identity which are replete with historical ellipses and devoid of any autochthonous or immigrant presence within its historiography.

Though Foucault did not dedicate much time to studies of Empire or to discourses of nationalism and the body, his writing nonetheless lays the groundwork for studies of biopower in these contexts. For instance, the “testing” zones of various systems of organization were to be found in the colonies of the 19th and early 20th centuries as “French modernity” was displaced upon colonized bodies, architectural spaces and urban sites of modernity as discussed in Paul Rabinow’s French Modern; or the relationship between colonizer and colonized which “was fundamental to the colonial order of things” such that sexuality and race are not separable, nor are theoretical and historical insights to sexuality and the body as detailed in Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (4); and of course the techno-politics of the modern state created by the interactions of sugar cane, malaria and discourses of nationalism in Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts. The epistemology and practices of biopower have retained their traces throughout the twentieth century through the present day and the violences of biopower cannot be overstated either domestically or abroad.

One of the most commonplaces manifestations of biopower from the latter half of the twentieth century through the present day is the production of virtual appearances and disappearances on the contemporary object of power—life and the body. Biopower, in its colonial and neocolonial exercises, has focussed upon the corporeal and the collective masses, bodies as populations, rendering the somatic visible or invisible depending upon the political circumstances or logistical feat. For instance biopower is manifested through seemingly innocuous acts such as the commonplace practice in which media underreports the numbers of counter-institutional protestors at political demonstrations or when the mediatization of these events render the visible bodies participating in such demonstrations as “misbehaving,” coding these bodies as dangerous, marginalizing these people from a possible legitimation within more centralized political discourses and praxis. Where Foucault sees biopower as a technology of control, the exercise of various techniques (and technologies) of authority onto the body, Negri and Hardt see biopower as that which implies resistance, that which “threatens us with death but also rules over life, producing and reproducing all aspects of society” (2004, 94) within “immaterial goods” such as knowledge and relationships:

Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself. (2000, 24)

Hardt and Negri view a direct link between global capital and biopower which creates wealth and power for a few while individual control of the body is lost. Ultimately for Hardt and Negri biopower is the biological life and labor of the body, produced by the body, as exercised by the citizenry through manual labour and affective exercises (emotional, family, community). What I find essential in Hardt’s and Negri’s approach is their inclusion of “work” and “production” as factors in the quotidian practices of biopower, whereas for Foucault the somatic is immediate, always present and is often a product of biopower and the institutions that oversee its exercise.

I would suggest that both definitions of biopower are correct inasmuch as Negri and Hardt emphasize the productive value of the biological, emitted from the body outward, and Foucault stresses the institution as ontology in his many analyses of systems of power that effect the somatic: from the welfare state to Fordist controls of the body. It is this conterminous effective and affective body that contributes to biopower today such as the sequencing of the Human Genome and recombinant genetics, the pharmaceutical industry which has turned the female body into a laboratory for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the male body into one continual and necessary erection, or biometrics which is quickly becoming a procedure that is adopted across governments and private industry. Foucault cites this control of biopolitics in “The Mesh of Power” (“Les mailles du pouvoir”):

Life has now become, from the 18th century onwards, an object of power. Life and the body. Once, there were only subjects, juridical subjects from whom one could take goods, life too, moreover. Now, there are bodies and populations. Power has become materialist. It ceases to be essentially juridical. It must deal with these real things that are bodies and life. Life enters into the domain of power. (2001, 1013)

Foucault views biopower quite differently than the classical vision of sovereignty in which juridical forms of power dominate — biopower is not a version of juridical power, though it is often based upon law or laws are made to reflect its force. Instead, biopower is a set of practices that politicize life by rendering life an object of science and of political intervention whereby power is exercised onto her body carrying a specifically anatomical and biological effect. To this extent, Foucault views biopower as the knowledge that can impact the species through organization and modification such that life can be conceived as both inside and outside human history. Ultimately Foucault opposes biopower to law in The History of Sexuality and “Society Must Be Defended” since his view is that life, not law, is the central issue of all political struggle even if the legal arena might seem to dominate: that the rights to happiness, freedom and so forth all derive from the body and not the juridical structures of sovereignty. Most interesting, however, is that for Foucault biopower continues to produce all forces that resist it, which in turn only extend its reach, like the function of subversion for Judith Butler, biopower is self-producing and self-contesting.

Yet, from the late 1970’s through the end of his life, beginning with The Birth of Biopolitics (Naissance de la bioplitique), Foucault makes another shift in his evaluation of power and in his strategic analysis of security through governmentality, specifically his critique of the liberal government and its power over life. Where Foucault views sovereign power as having the ability enforce power over life or death, exercising its power uniquely through violence. Yet, Foucault points out that since the 17th century, there has been a radical shift in how power is exercised as sovereign power was slowly replaced by bio-power. Biopower gradually replaced the sovereign right to take life, for instance, and instead this absolute control over life was obscured by the normalization of biological life and social technologies. Liberal governmentality aided this concern for biological life by engaging in the fiction of “nature” in order to shift its governmental practices towards newly emergent processes:

What matters is not whether or not this is legitimate in terms of law, but what its effects are and whether they are negative. It is then that the tax in question will be said to be illegitimate or, at any rate, to have no raison d’être. The economic question is always to be posed from within the field of governmental practice, not in terms of what may found it by right, but in terms of its effects… (17)

Here Foucault reflects upon how the government can be effective in terms of understanding these “natural” processes which it seeks to normalize while attempting to comprehend an entire range of relations within the social body (ie. between man and woman, tax officer and tax payer, doctor and patient, and so forth). These sorts of recognizable structural relations employ power in the everyday, yet Foucault’s notion of biopower takes such relations even further. He maintains that how we live within and outside these institutions has become an object of power and knowledge, something that needed to be controlled, even regulated, where the “power over life” upholds relationships of power today. Following from this relationship of power through various state institutions, Foucault recognizes that “nature” itself can be be manipulated by governmental practices putting into question the “natural” that political power disturbs: “What makes a government, despite its objectives, disrupt the naturalness specific to the objects it deals with and the operations it carries out?” (19). Foucault analyzes the relationship between “nature” and “governmentality” locating the governing force to turn subjects into free, neo-liberal individuals. It is here where see the birth of biopolitics as nature cannot be reconciled in terms of governmentality with each valence retaining its relative separation to the other, posing future questions of how juridical power might and can effect change in nature and how nature can affect juridical discourse.

And we see this type of contestation as Foucault attacks liberalism since its “jurisdiction” necessarily encroaches upon the “nature” of individual freedoms: “That is to say, the liberal art of government, is forced to determine the precise extent which and up to what point individual interest, that is to say individual interests insofar as they are different and possibly opposed to each other, constitute a danger for the interest of all” (67). Foucault continues to maintain, however, that liberalism’s danger is not so much univocally poised against the individual or the collective, but rather that liberalism must first and foremost respond to the “security strategies” that actually go against the very condition of liberalism itself:

The game of freedom and security is at the very heart of this new governmental reason whose general characteristics I have tried to describe. The problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom and security.’ (67)

When individual will endangers mass markets or private enterprise, where factories must not pose dangers to its workers, the economy of power to which Foucault here refers, marks this juncture where the states right/obligation to “protect” threatens the freedoms of the individual. What is “natural” to this social order, once threatened, can unleash a series of arbitrations that actually provoke a confrontation between juridical power and biopower.

Certainly there are many instances when we see the absence of the juridic agencies and where power effects the body directly. Yet, there are so many instances today whereby we are not seeing a gradual dissolution of the role of the state, the institution, in the continuance of biopower, and instead we are seeing an increased interest in the production of biopower through the role of the state and private institutions often stepping in for the state. We see many historical instances where biopower is attempts to normalize or order as mentioned early and in recent years: Halliburton’s contractualization of war-torn Iraq to bring back “order;” the United States’ use of mercenaries in Iraq basically surrogating war through the security firm Blackwater; Bechtel’s unsuccessful attempt to dispossess Bolivians of their water resources in the late 1990’s; a series of right to die cases from the United States, to Switzerland, to Italy; and the long distance, video game-like manner of fighting “wars” through computers, drones and the more recent trend of outsourcing war through local, darker-skinned bodies (our future potential “enemies”). And at other times, biopower has historically rested within the realm of the legal as the disappeared body is absent and its past presence or its present absence could only be authenticated by the very legal frameworks of documents, testimonies and recorded data, such as the processes which have attempted to bring back the dead, the missing, the desaparecidos. What we notice more and more in recent years, however, is that in the name of security, nothing is sacred, not even the life that security ostensibly sets out to protect. And as a result today, even the legal references of biopower are changing and being overshadowed by other discourses (more on this below).

Foucault makes reference to this intersection of law and life detailed in “Society Must Be Defended” wherein he distinguishes the “juridical rule derived from sovereignty” from what he terms “natural rule.” For Foucault the idea of emancipation is displaced by another ideal of preserving sovereignty wherein juridical and medical discourses function to create a “society of normalization” (34-36). Certainly the twentieth century has already marked itself as an era where jurisprudence has become somewhat demoted by the current favor of media consensus and medical discourse regarding the “normalization” of the individual, whereby now the subject more commonly seeks affirmation and legitimation from the larger blogosphere or medical community. No longer is it the institution seeking out individuals to normalize, for there is neoliberal social nexus where individuals voluntarily seek out their legitimacy within the structures of various institutions. The body, part of this panorama of securitization, is now procured by the subject who seeks to consolidate her identity through institutional narratives of legitimation. In his study of biopolitics as well as The History of Sexuality, Foucault documents how power shifted in western society throughout modern history: from the Hobbesian theory of the sovereign right to kill to a new regime of biopower in which biological life became the object of political power and surveillance during the eighteenth century, where power implicated the control and the promotion of life. The state of security evidenced in the early twenty-first century, however, demonstrates a biopolitical structure which turns the surveillance of the body both inwards and outwards, from the subject to herself and towards others, where individual will and the good of society are not necessarily antithetical.

Later in the 1980’s Foucault maintains this dichotomization between individual will and the good of society wherein he summons the reader to dispense with the antediluvian dichotomies of domination and emancipation in favor of a subject who can function despite her limits simply because “historical ontology” enables this subject to constitute herself, to question herself, and ultimately to change in the face of power relations:

[T]he historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions? (“What is Enlightenment,” 576)

Reading Foucault’s conceptualization of the individual responsibility for herself requires the subject to adopt a posture of active engagement rather than one of passivity or of objectification in order to understand how “we constitute ourselves,” lending the active voice to traditionally passive manoeuvres in addressing power. This sort of challenge that Foucault offers, specifically his notion of critical ontology of ourselves, extends a Kantian critique of actualité within a philosophy that is neither concerned with telos nor origin, but one that is invested in locating the subject in the here and now. The ontology of ourselves, Foucault advocates, must disavow all projects that claim to be “global or radical,” adding: “In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality…has led to the return of the most dangerous traditions” (284). So while offering a voice to power, a maneuver that does not reify the subject at the very least, Foucault nonetheless acknowledges the problems of emancipatory narratives through which the subject can ostensibly liberate herself, while in fact such narratives, just like the homeomorphic surface of the Möbius strip, seemingly lead one back to the subject’s foundations of oppression.

So what is the factor which mediates between the individual’s freedom and the security of the people in an age when the body is produced by the techniques of power and likewise where this body reproduces or simulates these very techniques? Foucault continues this distinction between these two interests:

What, then, will be the principle of calculation for this cost of manufacturing freedom? The principle of calculation is what is called security. That is to say, liberalism, the liberal art of government, is forced to determine the precise extent to which and up to what point individual interest, that is to say individual interests insofar as they are different and possibly opposed to each other, constitute a danger for the interest of all (2004, 65-66).

Since the turn of this century, international political economies have focused upon questions of security, especially in the wake of September 11, 2001. More directly, the body has become the immediate focus being targeted by the liberal juridical powers in the United States among many countries in attempting to, as their political rhetoric states, “target terror.” In proclaiming a “war” against terror, the US government has created, more overtly than any other government—although many governments do participate in the Global War on Terror—a tactical agenda completely in line with Foucault’s notion of “security devices” (dispositifs sécuritaires) and biopolitics whereby the body becomes the tactical line of evidence and division as well the conterminous object and subject of his own atonement or redemption. The security strategies utilized throughout the Global War on Terror—and the Obama-rebranded “Overseas Contingency Operation”— hold the subject hostage because his body, once private, is now rendered public: his potential as a security “threat” is scrutinized against itself and the orbiting juridic, medical and mediatized discourses which judge it either more innocent, or more guilty. Inevitably, the body occupies this space of dédoublement wherein it is enciphered with the signs of race, citizenship, ethnicity, and even humanity, from within and from without—the subject is doubly inscribed through the mediatization of his “identity.” Distinguishing fictions from truths to include those of race or citizenship, for instance, do not concern the systems of biopower. Rather biopower effects a recreation of the recreated truth, albeit temporal, which generally suit the political climate of the moment.

Biopower is the bastard child of neoliberal societies which have created elaborate systems of surveillance to control the body in pursuit of securitizing culture. As we witnessed the involvement of medical, psychiatric and anthropological professionals during the last fourteen years of the United States’ War on Terror, the use of jurisprudence, medicine and social science has helped to create the body as political object, the body that necessitated being acted upon, being controlled, and even being locked away. The discourses of race and religion since 2001 quickly became conflated by various state apparati whereby the body as affect became part of the larger scope of racial, ethnic and religious profiling throughout the west. The barometer of tolerance was lowered and the biopolitical techniques used against the subject were excused in the name of the “greater good,” the securitization of the state and the protection of “our freedoms” against those who are, in the words of George W. Bush, “jealous of our freedoms.” The tautology is clear: “we” are an ideological threat to “them” because they covet our freedoms. This is a complete reversal of what is exercised in the War on Terror (ie. “they” are a physical/security threat to “us”). Yet this Manichean terrain of freedom/terrorism and security/threat functions on a purely facile and blind acceptance of racial profiling, religious allegiances, and xenophobia. Never was it put into question what these freedoms are (or even if “they” actually exist) nor if these ostensible freedoms to disciplinary and regulatory power might actually have real effects on the lives of others. Very rarely did our media and juridic structures analyze the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as Special Registration, which focussed its surveillance on twenty-four predominantly Muslim nationalities requiring certain male non-citizens over the age of sixteen to register with Homeland Security. Everything down to the Muslim male body was re-naturalized and repositioned in the biopolitical theater where the recreated truth of the Muslim male was that of jealousy, danger, savagery, and inferiority. We have returned full circle to Edward Said’s orientalist analysis of Mohammadism, a purely western construct whose meaning had no resonance to Muslims. Fertilizer, a copy of the Qur’an, an accent, a video camera, or a prayer mat suddenly all became motives to search, sequester and detain, whilst the liberal citizens in whose name such racial profiling is carried out can be secured that indeed they are freer. The War on Terror evidences the most perverse and cynical of all possible self-fulfilling prophecies.

The extra-legal spaces created to control life—from myriad black sites, to Guantanamo Bay, to Abu Ghraib, to various prisons within the United States—all maintain the narrative of security, albeit unlawfully circumspect as arenas of political exception. The Muslim male body is made the surrogate for unlawful behavior, all in the name of security: his skin tone, his accent, his dress and manners, even when resembling that of the westerner, all render him immediately and always guilty. The suspension of the law in the name of “exception” has now become the norm and the body of the accused functions as a cultural synecdoche for the larger social body of Muslims. It is not at all surprising that the nude, duct taped body of John Walker Lindh, also known as “The American Taliban” or “Detainee 001” in the War on Terror, became the object of a mediatized vivisection, the terrorist body laid bare to demonstrate that terror can come from within, even from a nice, “all-American” boy from California. Is it in the least shocking that John Walker Lindh did not take part in terrorist activities as he remains locked up in an Indiana prison for another seven years while the government which actually did aid the Taliban, United States, to the tune of at least $43 million has through the present day remained conspicuously uninvestigated?

It is axiomatic that this War on Terror, almost in its fifteenth year, has nothing to do with investigating or stopping “terror.” Instead the Global War on Terror thrives upon constructing and disseminating innumerable fictions of perceived terrorist acts and terrorist bodies whilst abstracting a panorama of violence that will unceasingly be impossible to defeat both domestically and abroad. Ultimately, the War on Terror can never end. The nature of biopower in the context of state security today is two-fold: first, to de-personify the object of western violence while humanizing the western pathos of the Global War on Terror; second, to re-create the enemy, re-embodied and pre-packaged as the Muslim “terrorist.” In this way, biopower functions to place focus on the body of the individual over the act, such as Foucault’s discussion of capital punishment which invokes less “the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal…One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others” (1976, 138). Given the focus on the Muslim male body in contemporary western politics and the various behavioral typologies set up through the discourses of biopower today, it is not at all surprising that David Bruck is basing the defense of his client, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, upon convincing the jury through photos of the “unrelenting punishment” of the ADX Supermax facility (known as a “clean version of hell”) while leaning heavily on western stereotypes of the Muslim male who, once executed, would necessarily become shahid (a martyr). In order for Tsarnaev to escape death, he must paradoxically be proven to be the stereotypical Muslim terrorist who will suffer more and achieve less fame in life than in death, rather than be shown as yet another angry man whose acts of murder might just speak to the larger issues of male violence the world over.

Work cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (Revised Edition) London: Verso, 2006.

Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la biopolitique. Paris, Gallimard, Seuil, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. « Il faut défendre la société ». Cours au Collège de France, 1973-1974. Paris: Hautes Etudes;Gallimard;Seuil; 1997.

Foucault, Michel. « Les mailles du pouvoir ». Dits et Écrits II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. «Qu’est-ce que les Lumières». Dits et écrits, Vol IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité, 1. Paris: Gallimard; 1976.

Hardt, Michael et Toni Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Hardt, Michael et Toni Negri. Multitude: war and democracy in the age of Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Negri, Toni. «Negri on Foucault.” 9 October, 2004. http://libcom.org/library/negri-on-foucault

Stoler, Ann. Race adn the Educaiton of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Why Israel Should Not Exist

Garry Leech

By suggesting that the state of Israel should not exist, I am not being anti-Semitic. I am, however, being anti-Zionist. There is a distinct difference. An anti-Semite is someone who is prejudiced against Jews. An anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is opposed to that sector of the Jewish population who see it as their God-given right to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land at the expense of the Palestinian people who have lived there for two thousand years.

The creation of a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world not only represents the continuation of European colonialism in Palestine, it has also consisted of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the establishment of an apartheid system by a rogue nation that has repeatedly violated international law. Given this reality, and the fact that Palestine is the Holy Land of three religions, the only just solution to the Zionist project of the Israeli state and its Western backers is the establishment of a single country: a democratic secular state of Palestine in which Jews, Arabs and Christians all have equal rights.

The Rise of the Zionist Movement

The Zionist movement emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and encouraged European Jews to escape anti-Semitism by migrating to Palestine, which was ruled by the Ottoman Turks at the time, with the goal of creating a Jewish state in the Holy Land. This migration saw the Jewish population in Palestine increase from 4 percent in 1850 to 11 percent in 1917, the year that the British government’s Balfour Declaration stated: “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War One, the countries of the region were ruled by Britain and France under mandates from the League of Nations (predecessor of the United Nations). But World War Two brought about the downfall of the European empires as colonies throughout the world gained independence. Accordingly, Lebanon (1943) and Syria (1946) gained independence from France while Jordan (1946) was liberated from British rule. The exception was Palestine, which had been ruled by Britain since 1922.

By all rights, Palestine, like its neighbors, should have become an independent nation following World War Two, but the Western-backed Zionist project prevented this from happening. In accordance with the Balfour Declaration, Britain and the United States sought to ensure the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Under British rule, the Jewish population in Palestine had increased from 11 percent in 1922 to 32 percent in 1948, with many having arrived following the end of the war.

In 1947, the newly-established United Nations adopted the Partition Plan for Palestine without any consultation with the Palestinian people. The plan called for 56 percent of Palestine to become the Jewish state of Israel with 43 percent of the territory turned into a Palestinian state. Despite a large Arab majority in Palestine, Israel’s share of the territory was larger in order to accommodate the anticipated increased migration of European Jews. The remaining 1 percent of Palestine, consisting of the Holy City of Jerusalem, was to be an international territory administered by the United Nations.

Jewish groups supported the partition plan but Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states opposed it on the grounds that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter under which Palestinians should have the right to decide their own destiny. The plan was not implemented. Nevertheless, the Jewish population in Palestine unilaterally announced the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.

The New European Colonialism

By the end of 1949, according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Israel had destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages, massacred thousands of civilians and forcibly displaced almost a million Palestinians, who ended up in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries. In other words, with the Jewish people having just endured the horrors of the Holocaust, the Zionists were now carrying out, according to Pappe, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

This process of ethnic cleansing allowed Israel to expand and encompass 77 percent of Palestinian territory, all but East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Over the next three years, 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, mostly from Europe. This Jewish colonization of Palestine represented a continuation of European colonialism as the wielding of power over the Palestinian people shifted from the British government to European Jews in the form of the new Israeli state.

Following the 1967 war with several Arab states (Syria, Jordan and Egypt), Israel militarily occupied the remaining 23 percent of Palestine (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza). The UN Security Council responded by passing Resolution 242 demanding the “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The United States has since used its veto power in the Security Council on 41 occasions to ensure that the numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel’s illegal occupation have never been enforced.

It wasn’t until after the Palestinians were forced to exist under Israel’s illegal military occupation following the 1967 war that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) decided to make armed struggle the centerpiece of its campaign to achieve a Palestinian state. And it wasn’t until after 20 years of enduring an oppressive military occupation and the unwillingness of the international community to enforce UN resolutions that sectors of Palestinian society became increasingly radicalized and the Islamic group Hamas was formed. Hamas began using suicide bombing as a tactic in the early 1990s because it could not combat the vastly superior US-backed Israeli military through conventional warfare. Beginning in 2001, it also began launching primitive and inaccurate rockets into Israel from its Gaza strongholds.

Even though Israel withdrew its military from Gaza in 2005, it implemented a military blockade of the tiny territory the following year through which it strictly controls all access of people, food, medicines and other materials. Some analysts claim that Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants has created the world’s largest prison camp.

Meanwhile, Israel has not only continued its illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it has further violated international law by forcibly displacing Palestinian communities and encouraging Jews to move into the Occupied Territories. It is now estimated that almost half a million Jews live in illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem despite UN resolutions demanding that they be dismantled.

Israel has also constructed a giant wall known as the separation barrier throughout the West Bank in order to segregate the illegal settlements from Palestinian communities and to restrict the movement of Palestinians. Meanwhile, in addition to establishing the illegal settlements, Israel has also constructed industrial zones in the West Bank in which Palestinian laborers are forced to endure low wages and poor working conditions.

The flagrant discrepancy in rights afforded to the Jewish settlers in comparison to Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories constitutes a system of apartheid. In fact, as John Dugard, a South African human rights lawyer and former UN Special Rapporteur, has noted, “I have no hesitation in saying that Israel’s crimes are infinitely worse than those committed by the apartheid regime of South Africa.”

In 1947, the year before Israel declared itself a sovereign state, Palestinians lived in 94 percent of Palestine. Today, they inhabit a mere 15 percent with some five million living in refugee camps in the West Bank and surrounding countries. The population densities in Palestinian refugee camps are among the highest of any place on earth. For example, more than 10,000 refugees live in the one square kilometer al-Amari camp in the West Bank, which amounts to five times the population density of New York City. As one third-generation refugee in the al-Amari camp told me, “We have a dream to return to our lands. How long it will take and what generation it will be, we don’t know.”

The disproportionate number of Palestinians killed in the long-running conflict is a reality hidden from many in the West. Over the past 15 years, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 8,701 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis compared to 1,138 Israelis killed by Palestinians. The disparity in the number of Palestinian children killed is even greater with a total of 1,772 killed during that period compared to 93 Israeli children.

Given this history, the repeated claim made by the United States and other Western nations that Israel’s military actions are merely acts of self-defense contradicts the reality on the ground. Surely it is the violence carried out by people forced to live under a violent illegal military occupation and blockade that should be considered an act of self-defense. After all, the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two is viewed as a heroic struggle for national liberation. In stark contrast, Palestinian resisters are labelled ‘terrorists.’

Despite the best efforts of the United States and other Western governments as well as the mainstream media to portray Israel as the victim in this conflict, the numbers make evident who is doing most of the killing and who is doing most of the dying. The fact that a people forced to live under an illegal foreign military occupation are portrayed as the aggressors constitutes a stunning example of Orwellian doublespeak.

Collaborating with the Colonizers

This violent expansion of Israeli control over all of Palestine fulfils the European Zionist dream initiated in the late 19th century. Sadly, over the past couple of decades, some Palestinian leaders have been complicit in the Zionist project. The Oslo peace process during the 1990s saw the PLO recognize the state of Israel and in return Israel permitted the Palestinians limited self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. However, the so-called peace process postponed addressing the crucial issue of ‘the right of return’ for Palestinian refugees.

The first Palestinian parliamentary elections under the Oslo Accords were held in 1996 and were won by Fatah, the PLO’s political party, which then headed the new Palestinian Authority government. The Palestinian Authority began receiving significant aid from Western governments. In return, the Palestinian Authority has policed the Palestinian population on Israel’s behalf in the areas of the Occupied Territories that it governs. In other words, in the same way that Indian administrators and police oversaw the day-to-day governing of colonial India on behalf of the British colonizers, the Palestinian Authority has served the Israeli colonizers of the Occupied Territories in return for Western aid and a reduced Israeli military presence.

The infusion of foreign aid, especially funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is intended to achieve ‘economic peace’ by allowing sectors of the Palestinian population to attain a certain material comfort without challenging the ongoing Israeli occupation and the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which violate both the Oslo Accords and international law. In reference to the long-running, oft-stalled peace talks, former UN Special Rapporteur Dugard recently stated, “I think the strategy of Israel and also of the United States is simply to allow talks to go on forever and ever, while Israel annexes more land and takes over Palestinian territory.”

Meanwhile, the economic model emerging in the West Bank is not sustainable because it is almost entirely dependent on foreign aid and international NGOs. Furthermore, the benefits from the economic model are largely restricted to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority government, creating what is known in the West Bank as the ‘Ramallah bubble.’ As Dr. Hanan Chehata, a professor of law and former correspondent for the Middle East Monitor, explains,

… while those in Ramallah may currently travel throughout that small city relatively unimpeded, Palestinians in the rest of the region are subjected to daily humiliation at Israeli road blocks and military checkpoints; they also have to endure indiscriminate arrests and unjustified interrogations leading frequently to torture and sometimes to death. While the residents of Ramallah can go to work in the day reasonably secure in the knowledge that they will return home in the evening to a hot meal and well-rested family members, other Palestinians leave their homes not knowing if their houses will still be standing when they return or if they will have been demolished by Israeli Caterpillar bulldozers in order to make room for new Israeli settlements.

In other words, if the Palestinian Authority and its supporters cooperate with the Israeli colonizers they will receive economic rewards and be spared the excessive brutality wielded by the Israeli military. But those who insist on actively resisting the colonizers will bear the full force of Israeli aggression. Not surprisingly, in the eyes of many Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority has sold out to the colonizers by colluding with Israel and the United States to achieve ‘economic peace’ at the expense of national liberation.

The growing discontent with the Palestinian Authority became evident in the 2006 general elections when Fatah was handily defeated by Hamas. Following the election, Fatah refused to hand over power in the West Bank and, with the support of Israel and Western nations, has continued to rule for the past nine years as an un-elected government—while Hamas has governed Gaza.

The one place that elections have been allowed to take place is in universities and these are seen as a barometer that reflects the political views of the broader Palestinian population. In the student council elections at Birzeit University in Ramallah last month, the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Wafaa’ Bloc defeated Fatah’s student party, winning a majority of the seats. Nadine Suleiman, a fourth-year public administration student, explained why she voted for Hamas: “I detest the corruption of the PA [Palestinian Authority], their security coordination with Israel which involves arresting and killing Palestinians who are on Israel’s wanted list while Palestinians get nothing in return. The PA is only interested in keeping its wealth and privilege.”

The Palestinian Authority’s US-funded security forces quickly responded to the Birzeit University election results by arresting four students belonging to the winning party and then interrogating and beating them. In total, 25 students throughout the West Bank were arrested and scheduled elections in An-Najah National University and Hebron University were postponed. According to Human Rights Watch, “It is deeply worrying that students are being held by Palestinian forces for no apparent reason other than their connection to Hamas or their opinions.”

So while on the international front the Palestinian Authority has challenged Israel by gaining membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC), on the ground in the West Bank it regularly arrests, interrogates, imprisons and tortures Palestinians who are viewed as sympathetic to Hamas or who aggressively challenge the Israeli occupation in their quest for liberation. As a result of its failure to call new elections, its corruption with regard to handling foreign aid and its collusion with the illegal Israeli occupation, many Palestinians no longer view the Palestinian Authority government as legitimate.

In contrast, Hamas is seen by many Palestinians as actively resisting Israel, and it is this perception—and its relative lack of corruption—that lies at the root of its popular support. This resistance has also led Israel to launch three large-scale military assaults against Gaza during the past seven years (2008, 2012 and 2014). According to the United Nations, the Israeli military’s seven-week invasion of Gaza last year resulted in the deaths of 2,025 Palestinians, including 1,483 civilians, of whom 521 were children. Meanwhile, 71 Israelis died, of which 66 were soldiers. Additionally, more than half a million Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes by the assault.

The One-State Solution

The Palestinian Authority has accepted the two-state solution proposed as part of the Oslo peace process. The basic idea being that the West Bank and Gaza would constitute a Palestinian state (only 23 percent of Palestine) with the remainder being Israel. But the Palestinian Authority’s support for a two-state solution is at odds with the wishes of the majority of Palestinians. In a poll conducted last year, 60 percent of Palestinians believed in a one-state solution while only 27 percent supported the two-state option.

The two-state solution constantly being touted by the United States and other Western nations, and backed by the Palestinian Authority, is completely out of touch with the reality in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. According to Tariq Dana, a professor at Birzeit University in Ramallah, “A two-state solution is not possible. It is not viable given the reality on the ground.”

The reality that Dana is referring to is the constantly expanding illegal Jewish settlements that are now home to almost half a million Jews. The settlements now cover more than 40 percent of the West Bank, dominating the best agricultural land and access to the region’s principal water supply. As Daniella Weiss, a Zionist former mayor of a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, admitted a few years ago, “I think the settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality.” Clearly, any two-state solution that creates a viable Palestinian state would require the dismantling of these settlements and removal of the settlers from what the Zionists consider to be their Holy Land.

Far from dismantling the settlements, Israel’s policies are further entrenching them. With its building of the separation barrier, the Israeli government is seeking to annex the settlements into the state of Israel, which would leave the Palestinians with three small, unconnected chunks of arid and rocky land that lack access to essential water supplies. Such an outcome would not constitute a viable Palestinian state.

Many Palestinians support the establishment of a single state of Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the second largest member of the PLO after Fatah and a terrorist group in the eyes of the United States, Canada and the European Union because it advocates armed struggle, is opposed both to the Palestinian Authority government and the two-state solution. According to the PFLP,

The Palestinian liberation movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews. It is not directed against the Jews. … The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations and which will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world.

Hamas also sees the one-state solution as the only answer, albeit an Islamic state in which the rights of Jews are protected. But creating an Islamic Palestine would simply replace one religious state (Israel) with another. Given that Palestine is the Holy Land of three religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) and the fact that a significant portion of the Palestinian population supports a secular state, the solution to this seemingly intractable conflict could be the replacement of a Zionist state with a secular democratic nation in which all citizens—Jewish, Christian and Muslim—have equal rights and responsibilities.

Conclusion

The establishment of a Zionist state in the middle of the Arab world for Jewish migrants from Europe was only possible due to the support of Western imperialist powers including the United States, Britain and Canada. And Israel’s existence and ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitutes the continuation of European colonialism into the 21st century at the expense of the Palestinian people who have lived there for two thousand years.

Given this reality, the Jewish state of Israel should be viewed as both illegitimate and yet another catastrophic consequence of Western imperialism. The only just solution to this entrenched conflict is to finally allow Palestinians to establish the independent state they should have attained following World War Two and to allow for the return of all refugees. In other words, a single, secular Palestinian state in which Jews, Christians and Muslims all share equal rights. Such a one-state solution is not anti-Semitic, it is sensible.

Breast Cancer and Nuclear Sites

Chris Busby

Do nuclear sites cause increases in cancer in those living nearby? This is the question which has always been the key to stopping the development of nuclear energy.

For if the answer is Yes, the laws would cut in; human rights would cut in. Check Mate. The nuclear industry and its supporters have always known this, just as the cigarette companies and the asbestos makers recognised their own specific nemesis.

You can argue about the economics of nuclear till you are blue in the face, but they can always move the goalposts, global warming, future security of supply, special new safe thorium reactors and so forth. But killing people with your radioactive discharges: that’s it. The End.

This week saw the publication in a peer-reviewed journal – Jacobs Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine – of a study which I carried out in 2003 of breast cancer mortality 1995-2002 near Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex.

This is the first of a series of nuclear site cancer studies my colleagues and I have carried out in the last 15 years and which I have now decided to publish in proper scientific journals. In the same journal I wrote an editorial article about the problems of analysing cancer risk near nuclear sites.

Nuclear epidemiology – better choose common cancers, not rare ones

This question has historically been approached through analysis of childhood leukemia age 0-4, believed to be the most sensitive indicator.

But although child leukemia may be a flag for an effect, it has the disadvantages that the background rate is very low (6 per 100,000 children per year) and that nuclear sites (for obvious reasons) are built in sparsely populated areas with few children living near the source of the effect.

Therefore it is difficult to have enough statistical power to show that any effect you find is real and not due to chance, unless you study a large number of nuclear stations over a long period of time. But the German cancer registry did do this and found a doubling of risk in the children inside the 5km ring around all the plants in Germany.

Despite this, the authorities, the government departments, the radiation risk agencies like ICRP, UNSCEAR, BEIR and the UKs own NRPB (which is going through more transformations than a mayfly and is now Public Health England (PHE) after a period as Health Protection Agency (Radiological Protection (HPARP), or by the time you read this, maybe something else) are unconvinced.

The nuclear industry’s risk model does not fit the facts

The Gold Standard for these people is the Japanese life span study of the A-Bomb victims, where a quantity called ‘absorbed dose’ is correlated with the cancer or leukemia excess, and this provides a risk factor which is considered by them to be almost a Law of Physics.

This model is unable to explain the child leukemias by factors between 1,000 and 10,000. That is say, that the observed risk factors are 1,000 to 10,000 greater than the model predicts.

There are other problems with the design of the child leukemia studies (or indeed any studies around a point source of pollution). The method employed always assumes that the risk falls off equally in all directions. So concentric circles are drawn around the point source and these divide populations into radial distance bands.

The idea is that any effect will be shown by a continuous fall-off of cancer or leukemia rate as you go farther away from the plant. The problem is that these plants do not behave as light bulbs on a flat floor with the light intensity (the risk) reducing as an inverse square law.

Instead they make their aerial discharges downwind and their liquid discharges to the sea or to rivers where they accumulate. So studies should divide the populations at risk into those who live near the contamination and compare these with those who do not, and not on the basis of radial distance.

So in the Bradwell study, I took a different approach

For these reasons, the Bradwell study of breast cancer mortality is a valuable indicator that these considerations are important. Breast cancer has a much larger population at risk than children 0-4: it increases in women aged between 45 and 75. The incidence rate is 150 per 100,000 per year compared with 6 in the children.

And so studies of breast cancer near nuclear sites should show up a link, if there is one. And there certainly is. We have found such a link in Burnham on Sea downwind of Hinkley Point and on the contaminated coast; we have found it in the study we carried out of Trawsfynydd in Gwynedd. And we found it in the Bradwell study.

Bradwell nuclear power station was commissioned in 1966 and stopped generating in 2002. It is situated on the south eastern tip of the River Blackwater in Essex. The Blackwater is not really a river, but is a tidal muddy sea inlet on the East Coast which fills up and empties on the tides to leave large areas of sticky mud.

Long ago, I ran aground off Bradwell in the ten-ton gaff cutter Swift which I was delivering to Maldon for repairs. The lights of the power station indicated a brooding and creepy presence through the fog as we spent the night stuck in the mud waiting for the next tide.

Discharges from Bradwell to the Blackwater do not go away. The Blackwater is isolated from the north (the Colne) and the south (the Crouch) by extensive offshore drying sand and mud banks. So the radioactivity just sluices up and down and precipitates at slack water into the mud. The highest concentrations are at the head of tide, the town of Maldon which is at the western end of the estuary.

The rising trend of nuclear contamination in the Blackwater

The Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, MAFF provided measurements of radioactivity in the environment from 1970 and this continues today with annual RIFE reports. I have every annual report from the beginning on my shelves.

In 1970 there was 1.5Bq/kg Caesium-137 in the mud by the power station. 1976 there was 2.3Bq/kg. In 1977 it was 20Bq/kg. By 1984 it was 78Bq/kg; oysters contained Americium-241 and Plutonium-239. In 1993 there was 17Bq/kg at the pipeline, but the radioactivity had migrated up the Blackwater with 84 Bq/kg at Maldon.

NRPB calculated that the dose to the critical group, using what it believed to be the critical pathway, houseboat dwellers who ate oysters (Yes!) to be 0.01mSv or 1% of the allowed dose limit. (See MAFF 1994 Aquatic Environment Monitoring Report No 42: Radioactivity in surface and coastal water of the Briitsh Isles, 1993. Lowestoft: Directorate of Fisheries Research.)

But these dose calculations are based on the industry-standard radiation risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the ICRP.

There are persuasive reasons for concluding that this model cannot be used for internal radiation where novel radioactive elements that have a high affinity for DNA end up inside the body through inhalation or ingestion. And the same dose calculations were done for the children, and were unable to explain the leukemias also.

Recently available cancer statistics by electoral ward give much finer detail

So what did we do? Incidence data has always been impossible to get aggregated to small areas. They don’t want people like me ferreting about and turning up inconvenient results. But mortality data became available from the Office for Population Census and Surveys, OPCS beginning in 1995 after the organisation was privatised and needed money.

The Vital Statistics outputs give numbers of deaths from the main cancers, including breast cancer in the census wards of England and Wales. By 2003 I had all the annual data from 1995 and was able to add up the total deaths from breast cancer in each of the 26 wards around the Blackwater.

I also had the data for a control group – the wards along the River Crouch to the South which does not have a nuclear power station discharging into it and which is isolated by large offshore mud banks and tidal flows.

Using census data down to the same ward level I calculated the numbers of breast cancer deaths expected on the basis of the age breakdown of the population in each ward. You have to do this because cancer increases rapidly with age and you have to compare on an age-standardised basis. I also allowed for the Social Class of the women in the wards, again using data from the census. Breast cancer rates are higher in the higher Social Class for various reasons.

The Observed number divided by the Expected number gives the Standardised Mortality Ratio or SMR. This is all standard epidemiology.

More than double the cancer risk in heavily contaminated Maldon

My prior hypothesis was that the wards near the contaminated mud would have the highest breast cancer SMRs. And this was borne out in the results. The ward with the highest levels of contamination, Maldon, also had the highest SMR of 2.1

I began by conducting a statistical test comparing all the wards adjacent to the Blackwater mud with all the other wards in the area i.e. away from the mud. The result was a statistically significant 70% excess risk of dying between 1995 and 2002.

I then compared those living along the Blackwater with those living on the uncontaminated River Crouch. The result was a Relative Risk of 2.1. That is there was twice the chance of dying of breast cancer if you lived next to the Blackwater than if you lived next to the Crouch.

In case this effect was driven by an urban / rural effect I tested the town of Maldon against the town of Burnham on Crouch. The Relative Risk was again 2.1. The only explanation is that it is living close to the radioactive contamination which drives the excess risk. My prior hypothesis was confirmed.

A scientific controversy breaks out

Following our study of breast cancer mortality near Hinkley Point (which found excess risk of dying from Breast Cancer in the downwind town of Burnham on Sea) the West Mersea Residents Association contacted me and asked if I could have a look at Bradwell.

I did the initial study using data from 1995-1999 and this showed much the same effect, a doubling of risk. There was a lot of fuss when we published this from Green Audit, as there was with the Hinkley study.

The Essex Health Authority commissioned the Small Area Health Statistics Unit to come and repeat the study, paying them about £30,000 (we got £400 from the residents for ours). SAHSU found no effect at all and said Green Audit must have made a mistake.

The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, COMARE had a look. Yes, we had made a mistake. There were some wrong numbers where a few wards had become mixed up.

But COMARE also found that SAHSU had also made mistakes, leaving out the Maldon wards altogether. When the corrections were made, SAHSU found that we were right and they were wrong: indeed the effect we found got larger (worse).

The concentric circle comparison, the one that is normally used in the children studies, showed nothing. Relative risk was 1.04, there was no difference in rates in the inner and outer circles. If you look at Figure 1 it is obvious why. The estuary, where the radioactivity is, is in both the distance bands, inner and outer.

Wolves of water

This issue of Breast cancer around Bradwell was one of the key questions to be decided by the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, CERRIE as it was set up in 2001.

The Environment Minister, Michael Meacher required that CERRIE carry out three key epidemiological studies to determine whether the ICRP model was correct for internal radionuclide exposures.

This was one of the three and was to be studied by me, by Richard Wakeford of BNFL (now an ‘independent’ scientist on the ICRP and advisor on radiation and leukemia to the Children with Cancer charity) and Colin Muirhead of the NRPB.

There were several epidemiology sub-committee meetings to agree the study area, and indeed the study area was agreed to be the one presented here. But before the study was carried out (and probably because it was by then clear what it would show), Meacher was sacked by Blair in 2004, and replaced by Elliott Morley.

Morley, who later went to jail for fiddling expenses, shut down the CERRIE committee and the Chair, Dudley Goodhead, shut down the epidemiological co-studies. Goodhead got an OBE.

The shenanigans associated with these antics, including some interesting email exchanges I obtained under the Freedom of Information act, are discussed in my book Wolves of Water.

My duty to make these facts known

Why has this only now been published? Good question. The answer is that after CERRIE I became involved with Depleted Uranium. I am essentially lazy, and the effort required to fight my way through the referees of the journals was too much. I had another research area to invest energy in, Uranium photoelectrons and Iraq.

But now I am increasingly being asked for papers, and as I am getting old and may fall down dead suddenly, or even be pushed over a cliff by the bad guys, I have decided to get all my research papers out into peer review.

So what can we conclude? First, that studies of adult cancer around nuclear sites should focus on common cancers like breast cancer, or indeed multiple cancers. There is more statistical power.

Second, in such ‘ecological studies’ (where a region is taken as a surrogate for an exposure) the groups must be chosen as a result of determining where the radioactivity ends up, and not through some primitive circle drawing exercise.

This is an important message to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) who have been mulling over protocols for examining risk near US nuclear sites for several years now since they were bounced into it by pressure brought to bear on Congress by those people living near the nuclear sites, who can see what is happening to them and their friends.

Writing of which, I leave the last word to a Blackwater local, the Secretary of the Maldon Oyster Fishermans’ Association, Mr B J R Wright, who wrote to the Maldon Standard in April 2001 after our first results came out and were being dismissed by earlier versions of nuclear advocate George Monbiot:

“Trust the experts – what a joke. I find it more than a coincidence that in the last seven years four commercial fishermen who spent years working on the mud flats and fishing outside Bradwell have all had bone cancer. Three have died and I myself have only survived owing to the brilliant staff at Broomfield hospital. I have also been told that commercial barge skippers who regularly plied our river are affected by bone cancer.”

In the same newspaper a few weeks later the headline was:

“Council crackdown on breast cancer; residents urged to take up healthy eating and stop smoking.”

White Racism Matters!

Mark T. Harris

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously once said that a riot is the language of the unheard.

But riot is partly a misnomer to describe what happened in recent weeks on the streets of Baltimore following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. In fact, the rage on Baltimore’s streets was essentially an uprising against the deep poverty that afflicts the city.

This is not hyperbole. Spoken in the language of rocks and flames and with all the fury to be expected from communities permanently consigned to society’s margins, such violent street protests stand as a blunt rebuke of a socioeconomic system that has failed America’s urban minority communities.

Post-Racial America?

Despite the bewilderment of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and other media observers that such violent protests could actually occur in an American city, nothing that’s happened should come as a surprise. Many minority communities in the United States exist in a state of permanent economic depression. With its majority Black population, unemployment in Baltimore in 2013 among Black males in their early 20s was a staggering 37 percent. Nearly a quarter of the city’s residents live below the poverty line, with median household income half that of white residents.

Is it really necessary to repeat all the dire statistics? Indeed, is it even necessary to ponder the irony that only a few years ago the media was heralding Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory as the dawn of a new “post-racial” America? If anything, racism has been given a new lease on life since Obama’s election. For starters, there’s the irrational hatred of many white, right wing Americans for the decidedly moderate Obama’s politics, a disdain fueled by a kind of visceral antipathy for the very notion of a Black person in the White House. But more than this the wave of recent anti-police brutality protests has provoked a backlash in certain quarters, revealing the oozing sludge of bigotry that in more quiescent times simmers just beneath the surface of some segments of “civilized” white society.

Social media is one barometer of this entrenched prejudice. Consider the YouTube video circulating in recent months claiming to show Ferguson, Missouri teenager Michael Brown engaged in an assault on another man. One link to this video (since removed) showed millions of viewers, titled “Michael Brown Criminally Assaults and Robs an Older Man,” and begins by describing what follows as “What Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Don’t Want You to See.”

The video shows a stocky young Black man physically assaulting an older man outside an apartment complex. It’s ugly to watch, as the older man can’t do much to defend himself. Too bad the video is from 2012, was filmed in Woodland, Texas, and the real Michael Brown is nowhere to be seen, as the Christian Science Monitor reports. This is only one of many slanders against Michael Brown that has gone viral in social media.

What’s telling about this is not so much the gullibility of those who take cheap slanders as good coin, but the fact that so many people apparently want to believe the lie. Why? Indeed, why would people who did not personally know Michael Brown or his family, whose entire knowledge of his shooting by a Ferguson police officer comes from news and social media, be so quick to believe this young man was a law-breaker who basically got what he deserved?

Some will say video footage taken shortly before Brown was killed that showed him stealing a box of cigarillos from a convenience store, pushing away a store employee who approached him, is evidence he was just another street thug who really did get what he deserved? In fact, no criminal incident at the convenience store was ever clearly established or proven, nor was Brown’s friend with him in the store that day ever charged with or as an accomplice to a crime. What is established is the racial context of the many efforts to disparage Brown. As widespread as petty shoplifting is, certainly the middle class white man or woman who pilfers items from Macy’s or Nordstrom’s or The Dollar Store is generally not labeled a “thug,” called an “animal” or otherwise considered fit to die.

The Unforgivable Crime—Resistance

These days not too many white, middle-class suburbanites will openly complain about a Black person attending their local church or school. Nor are they inclined to defend the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Instead of screaming, hate-filled white faces confronting the Selma marchers of 1965, we now encounter those who blithely counterpose “All Lives Matter” to the protest banner, “Black Lives Matter,” as if even acknowledging the special persecution of the Black community constitutes some sort of special privilege unfair to whites.

This is the pathology of white racism, clueless to the end and teaching universal suspicion of minorities. The racial distrust runs so deep that often even success in life cannot overcome it. That’s what actor Rob Brown, who co-starred with Sean Connery in the film Finding Forrester and is featured in the HBO series “Treme,” discovered in 2013 when he purchased a $1,300 watch at Macy’s in New York City. Brown was arrested and searched by undercover cops who didn’t believe “someone like him” could afford such a purchase.

Like Michael Brown’s family, police chokehold victim Eric Garner’s survivors in New York City have had to endure similar affronts. The New York Post’s right-wing columnist Bob McManus referred to Garner, killed by police on a Staten Island street for selling loose cigarettes, as a “career petty criminal” who made the fatal mistake to “tragically resist” police. In other words, it was his own fault police had to kill him.

But there is the key word in all this—resist. What is unforgivable in the racist mind-set is when oppressed people make a decision to resist their oppression. Thus, if you’re Black and don’t want to get murdered by police, don’t look them in the eye, don’t tell them you’re not doing anything wrong and have no right to detain you, don’t object to being harassed on the street, and don’t even open your front door to police. All are circumstances that in recent times have caused unarmed, law-abiding Black citizens to be killed by police.

It was Leon Trotsky who once remarked that “the depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.”

As individuals reveal themselves so too does a nation. What is being revealed now in the United States is how deeply entrenched is the racist frame of mind. Indeed, as the Black community has thrown off “the customary conditions” of their lives to express renewed opposition to discrimination, social neglect, and police violence, racist attitudes among sectors of the white public have been etched in even sharper relief.

But the news is hardly all negative. Actually, quite the opposite. As the Black Lives Matter movement gathers force and continues to grow, heralding a new era in the fight for civil rights and social justice, there is an education occurring in society. The enduring specter of racism is being increasingly exposed and challenged by a new, multi-racial generation of young Americans, for whom it is understood that social justice begins in the streets.

The message of this growing anti-racist movement is clear. A healthy democracy means an end to the police as a weapon of the privileged, as occupiers of minority communities and purveyors of racist violence. Democracy should mean community control of the police.

Anything less is a form of oppression.

Are Monsanto’s Worst Fears Coming True?

Jonathan Latham

The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people’s idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation. A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle’s decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse. Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others. A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.

The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue. The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.

The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc., are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.

However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.

From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position. Kraft and MacDonalds, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long.

MacDonald’s already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products. For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.

Until Chipotle’s announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media. On May 8th, Hain Celestial told The Food Navigator that:

“We sell organic products…gluten-free products and…natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free.”

According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.

Why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow

The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.

The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).

The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012). Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call “extreme” (Bøhn et al. 2014).

The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly,

The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure).

That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.

Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. (Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.)

The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve. In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry. GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have “extreme levels” of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).

The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta’s PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.

A pipeline full of problems: risk and perception

The longer term problem for GMOs is that, despite extravagant claims, their product pipeline is not bulging with promising ideas. Mostly, it is more of the same: herbicide resistance and insect resistance.

The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs). dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the “Arctic” Apple, the “Innate” Potato, and Monsanto’s “Vistive Gold” Soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.

But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (pdf).

In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them “toxins”, as in this paper title from 1969: Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature 223: 715-717. (not online)

As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).

The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm. They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).

The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto’s Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants). These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses. Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.

The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.

The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of “consumer benefits” from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc.). The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs. Show a consumer a “healthy GMO” and they are likely to show you an oxymoron. The likely health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.

The end-game for GMOs?


The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations. Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and outmanoeuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We’re Experts). But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.

The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.

Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.

Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case. Liberal media outlets such as the New York Times, the National Geographic, The New Yorker, Grist magazine, the Observer newspaper, and any others who will have them (which is most) have been deployed to spread its memes. Cornell University has meanwhile received a $5.6 million grant by the Gates Foundation to “depolarize” negative GMO publicity.

But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto’s home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.

For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.

GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent “progress”. If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.