"Antiwar Rallies Draw Millions Around the World." It was a headline that made me proud to be a member of the human race. Facing a juggernaut of war, millions of voices were raised in protest around the world. How was the Bush Cabinet taking it? After all, these hawks are obsessive about lining up everyone around them like docile sheep. My guess is they were hyperventilating up their sleeves at the staggering scale of this opposition. Students and grandmas and housewives - here was no lunatic fringe, but the unstoppable force of the Many arrayed against the Few. The last time you had this grassroots turnout was after 9-11. The Bush administration rode universal waves of support to launch a war on Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, demonstrations of solidarity were up and running again. This time the tide had turned against war.
Matters weren't helped by equating this unparalleled mobilization of masses to the birth of a superpower. The Nation crowed about "The Other Superpower”. How could this not get a rise out of the White House? Over a decade ago its policy-makers strategized for the record about how the world could have only one superpower. To that end, they were willing to invade the Middle East and commandeer its oil. How could they tolerate the rise of another superpower?
To be sure, We the People are a force to be reckoned with. The government can’t just outlaw freedom of assembly, or send soldiers to disperse us or place us under house arrest. Or can they? A queasy shadow fluttered in the pit of my belly. The public was the only thing left between a free world and one enslaved to U.S. interests. What if, on top of plans for invading Iraq, the Bushites had a secret weapon to invade the world body politic and weaken its powers of resistance?
Say that you are a policy wonk in a right-wing think tank, and your mission is to devise just such a weapon. You notice that the sign of a robust democracy is people coming together to get their message across. How to convince them that it is not in their best interests to do that? How about the threat of contracting a plague? Camus had it right when he wrote an allegory about the spread of fascism and called it The Plague. You want to sicken a democracy to the point of hospitalizing it? Think epidemic. Not a full-blown epidemic that might backfire, but one with a few hundred casualties. Give it the appearance of a killer plague. Put the press to work to make the world deathly afraid of it. Send out intelligence agency directives to corporate-owned media to fan the flames of hysteria. The headlines read "Killer Virus on the Loose" and "Economy Falls Victim to Disease".
Of course, the World Health Organization must be on board. Instruct its regional director to say things like "the virus has already demonstrated its explosive power to cause sudden outbreaks in a large number of countries." Public health officials must show how seriously they take the matter by imposing a rash of draconian measures. And voila - a legal justification for banning people from congregating in public places, like civic plazas and Internet cafes. In the ‘public interest’, you can trample on the Bill of Rights by rounding up people and forcing them to be prisoners in their own homes.

Now mind, I'm not saying that the men who demonstrably stole the election in Florida are guilty of dealing such a sneaky blow to democracy. I’m saying that the military build-up on Iraq’s borders was matched by a build-up of anti-war sentiments. Then, like a bolt from the blue, comes a strain of virus. Nothing very special about it, just one of fifty strains of pneumonia, with a casualty rate of 4%. Your odds of dying are greater from falling off a ladder, being attacked by a dog or accidentally strangled in bed. The statistical reality is beside the point. What counts is the paranoia that has the public by the throat. To hear the media tell it, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is cutting a wide swath of destruction across the planet. As the panic reaches a boiling pitch, entire economies are wrecked and world-class cities become ghost towns.

If the U.S. did have an imperial mandate, it's on behalf of multinational cartels. Much of the public is convinced that the war on Iraq was for oil, instigated by men who served proudly not in the armed forces but in the petrochemical industry. What about the pharmaceutical industry? Why shouldn’t they get to score big in the ‘great game’, as Kipling called the imperialist race for new markets? No sweat. Just hype the coronavirus that is a distant cousin to the common cold as the next Spanish flu. Let Business Week go on record that "many infectious-disease experts fear that it will march relentlessly around the world." Raise the specter that it will ravage the U.S. economy as it ravaged Asian ones. Then suggest that the only thing that can save us is a new vaccine, one that the drug cartels will develop if only the government coughed up millions for R&D, and cut through FDA red tape that protects against killer vaccines. If the terrorist attacks could boost the stock of Exxon Mobil, imagine what these viral attacks would do for Bristol-Meyers!
Consider what just happened in China. As the largest Communist nation on earth, it can still give the U.S. a run for its money. How do you cut the Red Dragon down to size? Give it a whiff of bioterrorism and blow it up into a world-health catastrophe. Force the government to adopt WHO standards for defining and quantifying the disease. Pressure the authorities to ban travel and impose martial law. And you've dealt the greatest blow to the Chinese economy since the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It's a miracle no one thought of it before. Want to ruin the high-tech industry? Get a spook to unloose the coronavirus in the Silicon Valley. To ruin the Chinese economy, unloose it the Guangdong Province on mainland China - manufacturing hub of billions of dollars worth of products shipped worldwide. In an instant, the Asian markets are spooked into a tailspin. Chinese exports lose their competitive edge, and U.S. multi-nationals take up the slack.

What about those uppity Canadians who protest too much against the bullying tactics of the U.S. hegemon. Not to worry. Declare that a health emergency exists in Canada’s largest city. Have WHO officials excommunicate Toronto from the tourist trade. Then have the media portray Toronto, one of the cleanest, safest cities on earth, as a "pestilential Third World cesspit." Easy, isn’t it?
Many believe that President Bush hit the jackpot on 9-11, winning a golden opportunity to promote a police state at home and clinch the U.S. role as top cop abroad. Has no one noted how similar SARS is to Al Qaeda? Both are deadly, mysterious and elusive. Given claims by ‘experts’ that the coronavirus can only be contained, never eradicated, the war against the killer virus, like the war against terrorism, is not destined to end in our lifetimes. If SARS, like Al Qaeda, has any value at all, it is the politically redeeming value of fear. The real problem with Al Qaeda is not the attacks on the World Trade Center. It is that this rag-tag outfit of misfits generated stratospheric levels of fear that fueled preemptive wars of aggression and unprecedented attacks on the Constitution. So, too, as any observer of the Hong Kong scene will tell you, it's not SARS but the panic around it that has caused the real damage. You might think that containing this panic would be as much of a priority as combating the disease. But like the faulty sewage line that supposedly spread the disease in a Beijing apartment complex, the media's role is to serve as an infectious medium for spreading a rampant fear of SARS. Only with a build-up of mass hysteria can the powers that be, under the guise of controlling diseases like SARS, get away with forms of social control that would do Stalin or Hitler proud.
I won't go on speculating in this vein, for fear of having struck the motherlode of conspiracy theories. I'll just leave you with this. With the massed might of the world public breathing down its neck, what better way for the Bush administration to breathe easier than by relentlessly playing up a disease that leaves millions of people afraid to breathe, let alone mouth off in public? The public’s fall as a superpower is epitomized by two widely-circulated photographs. In one, raucous protesters are waving signs, exercising God-given rights of free speech. In the other, health workers in gas masks are assembled to be lectured about SARS, presenting row upon row of gagged faces.
If this was a social experiment, devised by the psy-ops division of a rogue intelligence agency, it would be a runaway success. If there is a they behind the SARS outbreak and the hysterical media blitz surrounding it, they have proven how easy it is to break the backbone of the Other Superpower. And with what? A cousin to the common cold, posing about as much risk to human health as the pets that Americans keep in their backyards.

Permission to be reprinted solely with author credit.
Neville Raymond is the author of The Genesis of Genocide