2. THE DAMAGE THAT IT DOES

Bullshitting is not a victimless crime.

In January 2009 two-year-old Kent Schaible developed symptoms including sore throat, congested lungs, and diarrhea. His parents, Herbert and Catherine Schaible, were members of Philadelphia’s First Century Gospel Church, whose Reverend, Nelson Ambrose Clark, maintains that “Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs.” Accordingly, Herbert and Catherine didn’t take Kent to a doctor. Instead, they prayed over him. It took him ten days to die of what turned out to have been bacterial pneumonia—a serious but perfectly curable condition.

Although the Assistant Medical Examiner of Philadelphia decreed that the death was a homicide, the parents were charged not with murder but with involuntary manslaughter. At trial, they claimed they hadn’t realized how seriously ill their son was, and they were sentenced to probation—with instructions to provide proper medical care for their remaining children should any fall ill.

In April 2013 history repeated itself, and the Schaibles’ eight-month-old son Brandon died of untreated bacterial pneumonia, dehydration, and group B streptococcus infection. This time the parents were convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to up to seven years in jail. In a sense they were unlucky that they’d killed the two children in Pennsylvania. Had they lived in Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, or Wisconsin, the plea would have been allowable in court that they were merely exercising their religious freedom.

The First Century Gospel Church has run into trouble in this context before. In 1991 nearly 500 children of that church and the nearby Faith Tabernacle Congregation contracted measles because of ideologically motivated failure to vaccinate, and six of those children died.

In sentencing the Schaibles, Judge Benjamin Lerner told them: “You’ve killed two of your children—not God, not your church, not religious devotion: you.” It wasn’t their religious faith that led them to kill their children. It was the fact that they believed, and acted upon, bullshit fed to them by people claiming religious authority.

Unfortunately, the Schaibles are far from alone in having killed their children for such reasons. As long ago as 1983 there had already been so many similar cases that the organization Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD) was set up to try to do something about it. If you go to CHILD’s website¹ you’ll find case after heartrending case of children killed by parents who fell for bullshit.

It’s not just misguided prayer, of course. In one recent instance, in 2013, seven-year-old Ryan Alexander Lovett of Calgary, Ontario, died from a strep infection. His mother, rather than take him to a doctor, had insisted on treating him solely with homeopathic medicines, and after his death she was charged with criminal negligence. Ryan’s disease could easily have been cured with antibiotics.

Apologists for medical bullshit often point out that their particular quackery is in itself harmless. Prayer doesn’t kill people. Homeopathic medicines, which are just water, don’t poison people. If you drink lots of orange juice to treat your cancer, the worst harm you’re likely to do is give yourself a bad dose of the runs. So long as the needles have been properly sterilized, acupuncture won’t harm you. And so on.

All of this is perfectly true, but it ignores one very obvious fact.

The reason the two Schaible children died was that they got the prayer instead of the medical attention. Quack cancer cures kill people because the sufferers don’t go see a real doctor until it’s too late. Failing to be vaccinated doesn’t hurt you, but if you catch measles or polio or small pox, then you’ll suffer harm because you didn’t get vaccinated. (I’ve devoted a whole chapter to the antivaxers and the harm they’ve caused—see page 161.)

The comedian Peter Sellers—the original Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies—died in 1980. He had suffered heart problems for years, following a heart attack in 1964. Frightened of the bypass operation his doctors recommended, he instead started consulting “psychic surgeons.” These quacks claim they use paranormal powers to perform surgery without anesthetics, pain, or scarring. In fact, what they use are sleight-of-hand tricks to convince patients and spectators that surgery has been accomplished when it actually hasn’t. By the time Peter Sellers’s friends were able to convince him his life depended on real rather than psychic surgery, it was too late. Moreover, his ill health had given him years of misery. The psychic surgery killed him not through doing him direct harm but through persuading him he could avoid the medical treatment he so much needed.

THE GREAT AIDS TRAGEDY

AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) is a lethal medical condition brought about through infection by a virus called HIV (for Human Immunodeficiency Virus). It’s a disease of the immune system: What kills sufferers is not the disease directly but those diseases which their immune system can no longer cope with. Transmission of HIV from one person to another is via the sharing of bodily fluids, especially blood, as can happen during unprotected sex, through blood transfusion, and if drug users share needles. Although there’s as yet no cure, there have been great strides in treatment, primarily using the so-called antiretroviral drugs, so that some people infected with the virus can expect to live a full lifespan.

Various strategies have been used in attempts to reduce the rates of AIDS infections. Most countries now have stricter controls over the blood used for transfusions than ever before. Major campaigns are underway in many countries to promote the use of condoms, usually through making sure they’re easily available and either cheap or free. Similarly, especially in major cities, many countries have introduced needle-exchange programs, whereby addicts can, with no questions asked, hand in used syringes and receive sterile ones in return.

All of these efforts at prevention have been hindered in one way or another by the merchants of bullshit.

First there have been the moralizers, those who for religious or other reasons object to the ready availability of condoms or safe syringes. They argue that the safest form of sex is abstinence—that the availability of birth control encourages promiscuity—and that drug addicts should just quit.

Both of these arguments look great on paper but make no sense in situations where you’re dealing with real human beings. Abstinence-only sex education has been demonstrated by various clinical researches to be counterproductive in preventing unwanted pregnancies and the transmission of disease—essentially because the resolve of even the most dedicated abstainers may crack, and when it does they almost certainly won’t have any contraceptives available. Talking about a study she’d co-authored in 2011, Kathrin F. Stanger-Hall of the University of Georgia summarized (my italics): “Our analysis adds to the overwhelming evidence indicating that abstinence-only education does not reduce teen pregnancy rates.”

A further point worth noting is that, if one partner in a relationship cheats on the other, the innocent person may suffer for the other’s unsafe sex.

Also obstructing the effort to curb AIDS was for a long time the myth that the disease is a “gay plague”—that it affects only male homosexuals. Sexually active male homosexuals are indeed the people most at risk, but the disease has claimed countless heterosexual victims. It was perhaps because of the “gay plague” stupidity that Ronald Reagan, the president during whose administration the disease really began to take hold in the western world, including the US, failed even to mention this rapidly escalating public health crisis until September 1985, when he’d been nearly five years in office. It wasn’t until May 1987 that he admitted publicly that there was an epidemic underway and set the wheels in motion to do anything about it. By then there were 30,000 diagnosed cases of AIDS in the US, with perhaps several times that many HIV infections. It’s obviously difficult to put a number to the avoidable deaths resulting from the delay in taking action, but it can’t have been small—just alerting people to the crisis might have saved numerous lives.

An urban myth has made heavy inroads that HIV is a manmade virus that the CIA is using either to control or exterminate black people. Another alarmingly prevalent conspiracy theory is that people who take new AIDS drugs are being used as guinea pigs by the government; because of this myth, people have refused the drugs that might have saved them.

There have been reports of people believing that HIV and AIDS don’t exist—that the real killers are the antiretroviral drugs forced upon patients—or that people are safe enough so long as they have a good shower after sex. And, of course, the usual battalions of vitamin- peddlers and bogus “nutritionists” have been on hand to say that scientific medicine can’t treat AIDS: The only hope is their quack remedy.

In 2003 there were reports that the Indian government was backing cow urine as a cure for a whole spectrum of diseases, AIDS included. In January 2007 Yahya Jammeh, President of the Gambia, announced that he’d had a dream in which his ancestors had told him AIDS wasn’t a viral disease, whatever scientific medicine said, and revealed to him a herbal nostrum that would cure AIDS within three to ten days. In the UK the popular “nutritional therapist” Patrick Holford recommended vitamin therapies, while his compatriot, the climate change denialist Christopher Monckton, announced in November 2009 that he was “working on a cure for infections including HIV”—a cure that has yet to be revealed.

By far the worst single instance of bullshit about AIDS was that of the Thabo Mbeki administration in South Africa. Mbeki was persuaded by opportunist quacks and AIDS denialists that AIDS was a non-viral disease that could be treated with massive doses of vitamins or other “natural” therapies; he flirted, too, with the conspiracy theory that AIDS was invented by the CIA as part of its plot to . . . well, identifying the purpose of the CIA’s plot has always been a difficulty with this particular conspiracy theory.

The precise death toll in South Africa consequent upon the efforts of Mbeki and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, to quash the treatment of AIDS patients with modern medicine will probably never be known, but it is certainly of a scale that would justify the use of the word “holocaust.” In 1990 there were almost zero HIV cases in South Africa; by 2004 about one person in three was infected. South Africa’s Medical Research Council estimated that the years 2005–2006 saw 336,000 South Africans die of AIDS—a truly horrific figure.

“REPRESSED MEMORY SYNDROME”

For too many years, social workers investigating cases of suspected child sexual abuse believed the following mantra, as did the legal system that relied on the evidence of those “experts”:

•  Always believe children who say they’ve been sexually abused— they’re invariably telling the truth.

•  If children say they haven’t been sexually abused even though the social worker suspects they might have been, they’re lying through terror of the abuser. The more they refuse to say they’ve been abused, the more terrified they are and the worse their suffering must have been.

A third part of the mantra ran like this:

•  However, a skilled, empathetic interrogator—such as the social worker currently giving evidence to you—can get the truth out of these recalcitrant children.

So the idea was that the children were invariably telling the truth if they agreed with the person interviewing them, but lying if they disagreed with the person interviewing them. This was the same principle as the one used by the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition—or indeed by “enhanced interrogators” throughout history: The truth is what the torturer has already decided it is, and the torture will go on until the victim says what the torturer demands, whether that’s truth or complete bullshit.

In the instance of the social workers and the supposedly sexually abused children, however, there was a further complicating factor:

Small children lie.

They can lie because they’re seeking the approval of the adult who’s asking them questions, or they can lie just for the fun of it, or they can tell untruths (which is slightly different from flat-out lying) due to a general confusion in their memory of events or because they have difficulty distinguishing truth from fantasy. Exploring the psychological background would take far more space than we have here, but even if we did so we’d find ourselves back at the same place:

Small children lie.

One extra point. Any halfway-trained, halfway-intelligent, halfway- conscientious social worker, child welfare officer, or district attorney should be perfectly aware of this. That didn’t stop numerous of these supposed professionals from bringing people to court on serious charges of sexual abuse based on evidence that was often no more than an unsubstantiated accusation coaxed out of an infant, without the remotest circumstantial backup. Sometimes the tales told by the children were so farcical as to be impossible for any sane human being to believe.

Take the case of school bus driver Robert Halsey, convicted in 1993 of repeatedly sodomizing two young twins on their way to and from school. None of the other bus passengers noticed anything. The boys were never late to school nor late home, so when could the crimes have taken place? Sometimes, the court heard, Halsey would force the boys to watch him catch a few fish, which he might stick up their rear ends. This is one you definitely should not try at home! The kids obviously hadn’t ever checked out a freshly caught fish.

And they didn’t make their accusations until a year and a half later, just after their mother had given birth to a new baby. One further widely known reason young children to lie is to jealous attention-seeking.

Yet not only was Halsey jailed, his several appeals have been turned down. This is clearly a case of the legal profession believing that the maintenance of its dignity—or some such bullshit—is more important than a man’s life.

Unfortunately, Halsey’s case is far from isolated. Although many similar verdicts have been reversed on appeal, people have lost years of their lives and sometimes much more. And there are plenty of instances of people still rotting in jail, their appeals, like Halsey’s, refused, on the grounds of evidence that is either nonexistent or beyond all credibility.

Complicating matters was the pseudoscientific notion of Repressed Memory Syndrome.¹ Although never much accepted by professional psychologists, the idea was widely embraced by social workers and by a few in the psychiatric profession. It was believed that people—specifically, young children—would suppress the memories of traumatic experiences to shield themselves from the pain of those memories. The memories didn’t go away, however, and the continued suppression of them could have damaging psychological effects. However, a skilled, empathetic interrogator—now, where have we heard that phrase before?—could tease the memories back out into the open. Confronting those memories would allow the person to begin the healing process . . . and would also, with luck, allow the avid social worker to get someone prosecuted!

All through the 1980s and 1990s there were high-profile cases in which whole communities of parents were charged with child sexual abuse on a massive scale. At about this same time there was a hysteria going on about Satanic cults, which were apparently infesting suburbia everywhere. Inevitably, the two hysterias were conflated, so that now the abuse was often occurring as part of a Satanic ritual.

Eventually sense prevailed, and in case after case it was demonstrated that the supposed crimes had in reality been invented by the social workers, who had used sophisticated means of persuading gullible children to “remember” events that had never in fact taken place. The social workers in most instances probably didn’t even realize they’d invented the crimes; they probably thought they were merely “confirming their suspicions.” Even so, it’s difficult to comprehend why at least some of them didn’t think to stand back, look at what they were claiming as reality, and say, “This is beyond belief!”—and why prosecutors, judges, and jurors so rarely did the same.

Again, innocent people served jail sentences, families were destroyed, and some people are still rotting in prison because of legal officers who’re reluctant to admit that sometimes their profession can believe bullshit.

“SAFE” SMOKING

It was in the 1930s that the link between smoking and lung cancer was first established. Unfortunately, this happened in Germany. The Nazis, whose scientific record was in most areas appalling,¹ were surprisingly sound on public health. They mounted various anti-smoking campaigns. When World War II ended, however, their work in this area was initially discarded along with the rest of the junk “Nazi science.” (At the same time, of course, the victorious Allies were busily recruiting Nazi rocket scientists. The Nazis were good at rocket science, too!)

A few years later, in the early 1950s, the science about smoking was rediscovered in the US and the tobacco companies wondered how they could minimize the consequent damage to their profits. They realized the public wouldn’t respond well to a straightforward ad campaign saying the medical researchers had gotten it All Wrong and smoking was safe. Instead, the companies set up a fake think tank, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which hired compliant scientists to cast doubt on the scientific consensus. So long as the public thought the case against cigarettes wasn’t cast-iron, the companies reasoned, people would tend to assume they could ride their luck.

The tactic was hugely successful, and there was a delay of many years before public health officials could finally enforce such steps as putting warnings on cigarette packs. The lesson learned by the tobacco companies—that hiring useful idiots to cast false doubt on scientific research is the way to go—was noted by the fossil fuel companies. Corporations like Exxon and Koch Industries have used exactly the same technique to deceive the public about climate change.

There was a further long struggle over the issue of secondhand smoking, with the cigarette companies’ think tanks saying the evidence of its dangers was slight even though it was perfectly obvious the evidence was solid. A few minutes’ browsing on the internet will show you there are still some people who believe the companies’ propaganda.

Today, even though in many countries there are controls over where people are allowed to smoke, the cigarette companies have carried the fight to nations like Australia and to the developing world. When the Labour Government in Australia took action to have graphic warnings printed on cigarette packs, British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, and Philip Morris International spent a huge amount of money attempting to swing the 2010 election. That same year, Philip Morris International sued Uruguay’s government over its insistence that health warnings should cover 80 percent of a cigarette pack’s surface; the case is still underway. Since the corporation’s annual turnover is about twice Uruguay’s GDP, this is something of a Goliath-versus-David fight—and an attempt at a gross violation of national sovereignty that other countries might do well to see as a warning.

How many lives have been cut short because of the tobacco companies’ bullshit? How many people have had their lives ruined by smoking-related illnesses? How many kids have died because of secondhand smoking? How many men have been rendered sexually impotent through smoking? How many people have had to have limbs amputated because of their smoking habit? And how many children are right now being turned on to smoking by the uninhibited marketing campaigns the cigarette companies are running in the developing world?

Estimates differ, but everyone agrees the numbers are huge.

The pretense that the science on the hazards of smoking was dubious was, of course, utmost bullshit from the moment the cigarette companies began their campaign back in the 1950s. It’s a bit of bullshit that has killed millions.

THE MASTER RACE

During the eighteenth century it became clear to German thinkers (as it did to their counterparts in other European countries) that the Bible’s account of Adam and Eve was probably not literally true. Where, then, had white people—the supposed pinnacle of humanity—come from? Africa was out of the question, of course. It was known that some of the civilizations in Asia were incredibly ancient. Since it wasn’t at the time widely appreciated that the earth could be much older than humankind, these very old civilizations of India and China were thought to be almost as old as the world. Naturally, the people who were living in India and China now couldn’t be the original, pure-blooded human stock, because they weren’t white . . .

And so, from several strands of baloney thinking, there arose the anthropological myth of a primordial white race of humanity, the Aryans, who arose in the general region of the Himalayas—for some reason high mountains and a moderate climate were regarded as an important prerequisite for the emergence of topnotch specimens of humanity.¹ Fastidiously avoiding any interbreeding with other races, the Aryans emigrated from India and finally ended up in and around Germany. There, for reasons unexplained, they finally did do some interbreeding, but it was with Nordics and so was regarded as strengthening rather than weakening the race.

Even after it had become evident that the planet was hugely older than earlier thought—and that humankind was a relative latecomer to the scene—the pseudoscience concerning the Aryans remained popular among white racists all over Europe and North America. It still hangs around even today, causing human misery wherever its cancer spreads. The fact that the legend has been demonstrated time and time again to be false—that it cannot possibly be true—means nothing to the hatemongers.

The place where the Aryan bullshit did the most concentrated damage was, of course, Nazi Germany.

There were all sorts of ways a Nazi could tell you weren’t an Aryan. If you were a Jew or a gypsy, or if your skin color wasn’t white, that was an obvious giveaway. The Slavic peoples, the Poles, the Serbs—all were obviously subhuman. Surely no Aryan would be homosexual or mentally handicapped. The list went on. Some “defective” people were merely sterilized and/or incarcerated in concentration camps; as all the world knows except for a few fervent Holocaust deniers (see page 226), millions of others were murdered at random, starved to death, or slaughtered in highly organized extermination campaigns.

The exact number of people the Nazis murdered is uncertain. Most people agree that about six million Jews were slaughtered, many of them children. Probably about a million Romanies died, plus millions of Serbians, Slovenes, Poles, and Russians. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people were murdered, plus many tens of thousands of Freemasons. Thousands of homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people of color were put to death. Some estimates put the total death toll of the Holocaust as high as 30 million or more; most put it at about 15–20 million.

And all because of bullshit.

THE MOST DANGEROUS BULLSHIT OF ALL

The death toll from the Nazis’ racist nonsense is absolutely horrific—so huge it can be difficult to take it in. Yet it’s only a part of the total caused by modern racism, which came into the ascendant at roughly the same time as the start of the full-scale transatlantic slave trade in the early seventeenth century: It is far easier to behave inhumanely to your fellow humans if you can persuade yourself they’re not in fact really humans, and ideas of “inferior races” offered the perfect excuse. Even though institutionalized slavery is no longer with us (which is not to say the slave trade has ended, alas), racism of one kind or another obviously still survives in most of the world’s communities, and continues to exact its annual tribute of death and human misery.

But all such casualty figures are as nothing compared to the one we’re facing should we career at full speed into catastrophic climate change, which is exactly what we appear to be doing thanks to the bullshit being spread by the fossil-fuels corporations, their shills, and their useful idiots. One common smear about climate scientists has it that they’re “alarmists”; it’s an especially stupid smear because the climate change we’re facing is, as we’ll see in a later chapter, something that it’s impossible to be too alarmed about. We can expect a death toll in the billions unless very soon—like, yesterday—we cut the bullshit and start acting like rational adults.

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1. http://childrenshealthcare.org/.

1. Sometimes called Recovered Memory Syndrome, and now more often called False Memory Syndrome.

1. For example, they rejected evolution, believed in an Aryan master race (see page 44), practiced eugenics (see page 109), and trashed “Jew science” like Relativity in favor of a crackpot theory that the universe was made of ice!

1. Some revisionist thinkers claimed the Aryans originated in the lost continent of Atlantis (see page 244). And why not? There’s as much reason to believe in Atlantis as there is in the Aryans.