Should we be so Generous as to Assume the World Health Organization Even Began With “Good Intentions”?
Canadian Psychiatrist George Brock Chisholm, First Director General of the WHO.
The Workers League, based currently in Australia, is one of the very few organizations committed to revolutionary socialism and medical freedom, and to determined opposition to the ruling class’s Great Reset. Recently, (February 17th, 2024), in line with these commitments, the WL published an article entitled “Exit the W.H.O.”, in their online publication, Red Fire Online. These leaders began their article with the following statement:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) may have begun with good intentions in 1948, as an adjunct body to the United Nations (UN), but today working and oppressed people of the world encounter the WHO as a blunt instrument of global tyranny imposing deceitful and potentially deadly edicts.
Later on, the author states that “The WHO no longer serves any progressive purpose, and is now used against workers, and not at all for their health.”i
I have absolutely no quibble with these characterizations of the WHOs present-day, anti-working class, “potentially deadly” agenda. My problem, however, is the rather generous historical assumption that the World Health Organization ever had a progressive purpose. This assumption, as I hope to reveal in the following article, is erroneous, and is the result of a still-lingering credulity, on the part of the WL, with regard to the ideology of capital P Progressive scientism.
Scientism has two basic elements. What we will call Stage One Scientism, is the version critiqued by C.S. Lewis. This is the belief that the traditional wisdom embodied in traditional religion, not only can safely, but should, be completely replaced, rather than merely augmented, by science. In other words, Science Should Replace Religion.
Unless one is religious (like C.S. Lewis), this version of scientism, on the surface, would not seem to pose any problem, for socialists. The religious elements of what Gramsci called the “common sense” of ordinary people, are often the product of the “manufacture of consensus” which produces compliance with their rule, by ruling classes past and present. Belief in the authority of “God the Father”, for perhaps the most important example, can easily be transferred upon more earthly authority, behind which, as radicals from Spinoza through Bourne said, sit the financial fat cats: the King, the President, the State.
However, given the context of corporate capitalist society, there are problematic tendencies to which this ideology leads, which we should examine carefully. The cure of elimination can prove to e worse than the disease:
Religious “common sense” contains the wisdom, or what Gramsci called the “good sense”, that ordinary people have developed to protect themselves from the ruling class, to optimally deal with life in general, and to provide an ethical basis for getting along with each other and for meeting our collective needs, including the best ways to raise our children, with as much of the limited resources left to us after the ruling class exploits us.. It can embody the collective “memory”, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “as it flashes in a moment of danger”: an “emergency”ii, such as fascism, war—or a phony “pandemic”--brought on by the ruling class in its conflict with the producing classes, including especially the working class, as well as its chronic inter-imperialist conflicts, and its superexploitation of Third World nations.
Gettiing rid of religion, can easily mean throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater: giving up the traditional wisdom it embodies, and thus falling prey to a far blinder, much more self-destructive form of compliance with the diktats of the ruling class. As can be seen during the past “pandemic”, when billions of people, in the (false) name of “science”, gave up their right to bodily autonomy and to the Nuremberg Code, to take a “vaccine” never tested for safety, effectivity, nor even proven necessary.
Given the authoritarian social psychological effects upon most people from corporate capitalist relations, and the corruptive influence of the corporate profit motve upon Establishment Science itself, it is an easy step from this attempt to replace religion with science, to a transformation of science into a new authoritarian religion, which disguises such corruption with this authoritarianism, transforming a monster like Anthony Fauci, and his sidekick, Francis Collins into a saint, or a pope: omniscient, and omnibenevolent.. This is what I would like to call “Second Stage”, or Religious, Scientism.
A genuinely scientific attitude is one compatible with revolutionary democratic socialism. The institutionalization of such an attitude should be added to the Fourth International’s Transitional Program. If and when ordinary people, non-experts, adopt such an attitude, they understand that it is their right and their duty to demand proof from scientists—proof produced by an employment of the scientific method--that the technologies they develop and promote—vaccines, fracking, GMOs, psychotropic drugs, etc.--are safe, effective, and necessary.
But in Scientism Phase Two, after, in Phase One, scientism aims to replace traditional religious wisdom with science, it then goes on to transform science itself into a new, authoritarian, faith-based religion. This is a product of the professional corporate middle class’s hope for a third way between Robber Baron capitalism and workers’ control-based socialism: and the acceptance of this false ideology by socialists, who ought to know better. For this class, with the (mis-)guidance of the ruling class, scientific expertise becomes a magic elixer that immunizes the medical establishment—and the corporate capitalist system in general--against all capitalist corruption: obviating the need for socialist revolution, and the loss of privilege that the middle class would thereby face. Middle class scientific experts, staffing an enlargened government, will rein in the abuses of the Robber Barons, as well as the corrupt political machine bosses that do their bidding.
Utilizing this religious version of scientism, the ruling class discourages the middle and working classes from demanding any scientific proof. Witness the derision, during the “Covid-19 pandemic” with which the “Scientific” Medical, Political, and Media Establishments, with which were greeted those who aimed to “do their own research”.Instead, we are told to “trust in the science”. Dr. Anthony Fauci went so far as to claim—without ever offering any evidence for the safety, effectivity, or necessity of his technocratic diktats—that when “you attack me, you attack the science”: thereby attempting to transform himself into some kind of Pope.
The scientistic credulity of the WL does not by any means match the level of such credulity infecting most organizations committed to revolutionary socialism today. Even the Spartacist League, which has come out against the lockdowns and in support of the truckers’ convoys, still upholds the unfounded and now completely disproven notion that these mRNA clot shots are “lifesaving”. The WL harbors no such illusions, and that is to their credit.
Drawing upon a radical tradition of skepticism about such scientism, that stems back to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses on, respectively, the “Arts and Sciences” and “The Origins of Inequality” the WL has ably critiqued such credulity in their article, “Stop the Great Reset”. As follows:
Socialists are the last ones to oppose the use of technology to advance society, and in fact are its foremost advocates. However, as long as the working class does not have its hands on the reigns of state power, the capitalist ruling classes will use advances in technology for their advantage, and no one else’s…. The further the system of production for private profit drags society down, the greater the degree of political repression is required by the ruling elite. While technological improvements can make some aspects of workers’ lives easier, the agents of big capital can also use them for merciless tyranny. iii .
But this generous attribution of benevolence to W.H.O.’s original intentions indicates that the WL itself harbors such illusions. If we counterpoise the passages I have quoted from both articles, we are left with a rather dubious assumption. Post-WWII institutions like the W.H.O. just may have had “good intentions” originally, for only three possible reasons. Through a process of deductive reasoning, I will attempt to show that it their religious scientism that led the author(s) to make this claim:
1) Right after WWII, the working class did “have its hands on the reigns of state power”
While reformists might go for this, no Marxist would ever go for it, so I doubt very much the WL believes it.
2) Right after WWII, the “capitalist ruling classes” did not “use advances in technology”—such as advances in medicine—”for their advantage, and no one else’s”
Of course, in any era, any ruling class will “use advances in technology for their advantage.” Is the unstated assumption here that, immediately after WWII, if not earlier (during the Progressive era), in its use of such advances, the ruling class was also guided by a concern for the welfare of the global masses?
What would be the motivation for such cross class altruism? The ruling class, during the Progressive and the post-war eras, would need, during this era, to be a revolutionary class, intent upon mobilizing classes lower on the SES scale than they, against some ruling class. But the U.S. capitalist ruling class, which had triumphed in WWII and was the guiding force behind the creation of the W.H.O., had ceased to be revolutionary with the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the dawn of the Gilded Age—which, coincidentally, was also the dawn of the Progressive Era. And as Lenin argues in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by at least this era, the era of imperialism (the latter part of the nineteenth century), Capitalism had “grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”
Of course, as Bolshevik Leninists, the members of the WL know all this. Thus such a delusion in the “progressive” character of post Reconstruction corporate capitalism, cannot have been the reason for their claim.
3) The third reason, which is the reason I believe this WL author(s) has unthinkingly accepted, is his acceptance of Stage Two Scientism—which was the product of the Progressive, imperialist era. The W.H.O. was created and staffed, at least in part, by medical scientists (For God Sakes! “Health” is their middle name!). Therefore, in so doing, they just may have had “good intentions”.
To fully understand the W.H.O.’s present policies, it is important that we shed all scientistic illusions in the supposed benevolent intentions of the W.H.O. and other purportedly “scientific” planning and regulatory organizations that were set up by the ruling class in the twentieth century.
With regard to Progressive institutions such as the FDA, the CDC, etc., two historians, sadly no longer with us--James Weinstein, and Gabriel Kolko—wrote exposes that the original agenda of these Progressive institutions were aligned not with the welfare of ordinary people, but instead with the agenda of the ruling class. From their beginning, whatever the intentions of the Progressive middle class rank and file—the ruling class wire pullers who really ran the show from above, did not intend that these institutions “serve the public.” They served the new corporate capitalist monopolists in driving smaller businessmen out of business, stabilizing prices, and creating effective cover for continued abuse. The most notable example of the “public service” offered in actuality by Progressive institutions and actors, is the career of city-destroyer Robert Moses, as delineated by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.
Neither did those who founded the W.H.O. aim to further the welfare of the global working class. This is readily apparent from an inquiry into the financial and organizational associations, ideology and policies of its first Director General, the Canadian psychiatrist, George Brock Chisholm: an advocate of amoral pedagogy aimed to undermine parental authority over children, population control (i.e., eugenicism) and mass mind control. Indeed, far from imbuing his W.H.O. with “good intentions”, Chisholm can rightly be viewed as one of the founders of the Great Reset. And the W.H.O. has always been one of this fiendish agenda’s essential instruments.
Chisholm as Stage One Scientistic Idealogue: Replacing Tradition with Science:
I first encountered accounts of the ideology and policies of Canadian psychiatrist George Brock Chisholm, in the book, Haven in a Heartless World, by Christopher Lasch. After his brilliant career as an anti-war socialist critical intellectual, following in the footsteps of Frankfurt School Director Max Horkhheimeriv, Christopher Lasch went on by the mid 1970s to even more brilliantly discuss how such behavioristic childrearing practices were really designed to create a narcissistic, authoritarian, conformist, corporate employee. This was the book that started him on his new career. Here, Lasch cites a speech he made a year prior to this stint at the W.H.O, He advocates an approach to to child pedagogy that is identical to the ideology of Stage One Scientism, as we discussed above If world wars were to be avoided in future, the remedy, according to Chisholm, was certainly not socialism. Instead, Chisholm opted for futurist modernity. Borrowing the title of one of Nietzsche’s books, Chisholm proposed to move “Beyond Good and Evil”. As was consistent with Chisholm’s Progressivism, he argued that the traditional wisdom upon which parents rely for childrearing should be completely abandoned. What would take its place? Mental hygiene. Future generations of children would be reared by teachers with a therapeutic sensibility: presumably, the pedagogy that was all the rage at the time: John B. Watson’s behaviorism.
In his 1928 work, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (Norton, 1928), Watson argued that mothers should an adopt an “objective” attitude toward their children; and they could start by ceasing and desisting the hopelessly anachronistic practice of kissing and/or hugging them.v Children’s minds would be “adjusted” by teachers and psychiatrists to fit into the new “Therapeutic Society”.
Chisholm argued that such an approach was necessary to create the basis for “critical intelligence”. But that’s a farce, one which he himself must have been dimly aware. Here are the seeds instead of the “merciless tyranny”, threatened by “eugenicist billionaires, against which the WL and others in the medical freedom movement have warned us recently, Without the wisdom of the past, there is little potential to base any critique of the policies, imposed upon us by the corporate capitalist ruling class, in the present. What Chisholm is pushing is akin to the project of “analytic philosophy”, as critiqued by Herbert Marcuse in his One Dimensional Man. In the name of eliminating irrationality from common language, this philosophic school aimed to root out its traditional subversive, rebellious elements.
The way to create foster critical intelligence, an intelligence that is radical, that, as Marx writes in the Introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, promotes the “categorical imperative” of liberating human beings from all that now oppresses them, is not to discard the past, but instead, to creatively appropriate the positive wisdom it offers, while critiquing its reactionary elements. Or, as Ray Davies writes in “We are the Villiage Green Preservation Society” title song of the great 1967 Kinks’ album about modernity, our mission must be
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
Instead, however, Chisholm promoted an approach to child pedagogy that was thoroughly totalitarian-authoritarian.
Why?
Far from having anything to do with furthering progress, Chisholm, like most other Progressives of his time, served the reactionary, elitist totalitarian agenda of the ruling class. Progressives rejected their Social Darwinist rivals’ view that the old nineteenth century laissez faire economics was still the best system of control for the capitalist system: opting for the “visible hand” of the expanding Progressive state instead. Yet they agreed with the class elitism of the Social Darwinists—as long as it included an elitism for themselves, the professional middle class, vis a vis the working class. In the view of both of these sets of idealogues, the working class was seen as an inferior species: whose welfare, and whose oppression by the capitalist system, was relatively unimportant.
Certainly, these members of the professional middle class were interested in reforms that might, short of revolution, benefit the working class. Their agenda was in line with the political agenda of the old style independent middle class of artisans and shopkeepers, as discussed by Marx and Engels in the March 1850 Circular Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League: to buy off the working class with “alms”, but not to grant them any power. While the Ptogressives fought for very limited reforms on behalf of workers—trade union rights, social security, welfare—given the choice the capitalist system, and aiding the working class in the fight for their own liberation—and the Progressives would always choose (and still will always chooses) to defend their corprorate capitalist masters.
Chisholm and Eugenicism
Ruling class and Petite bourgeois contempt for the welfare and rights of ordinary people, goes all the way back to the economist Thomas Malthus, a founder of eugenicism. Charles Dickens strongly rejected this doctrine and this contempt, in the novel, A Christmas Carol. Unredeemed at first, its protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge refuses a request by philantrhropists that he help them feed the poor and prevent starvation and death. In terms borrowed straight from Malthus, Scrooge replies, “If they are to die they had better do it then, and decrease the surplus population.” Later, as the visitations of the Spirits of Christmas Past and Present soften his heart, he asks what the latter spirit envisions will be the longevity of the crippled son of his employee: Tiny Tim. Christmas Present angrily responds with Scrooge’s own Malthusian sentiment, and adds to it the following: “To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life amongst his hungry brother in the dust!”
The Progressives’ contempt for ordinary people, and their racism against the darker hued members of the lower classes, led many of them—Supreme Court Chief Jusice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (his father, the head of Harvard Medical School, was also a eugenicist), birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to name just a few Progressives—to embrace the doctrine of eugenicism., otherwise known as “population control”.
According to his biographer, John Farley, Chisholm, as the first Director General of the WHO, made “population control” its mission. There is absolutely no difference between the WHO under Chisholm, and the WHO, guided by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, in injecting many young black women in Kenya, under the guise of preventing diptheria, a vaccine that would permanently sterilize them.vi
But that’s not the worst:
Chisholm as Promoter of Mass Mind Control,
In a new book that every single medical freedom advocate, and every single revolutionary socialists, ought to read, “Covid-19, Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy, David A. Hughes reveals that Chisholm, working with John Rees, Director of the Tavistock Clinic, and the Rockefeller Foundation (also a eugenicist base) was a proponent of mass mind control. Rees had taken over this clinic (now serving as a promoter and of scientifically dubious “trans-sexual” procedures for minors!) and there pioneered techniques for not only interrogation, but reducing people to the level of automatons, to be used as patsies during political assassinations (or RFK Sr., and John Lennon, for example), via torture—as discussed by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine.vii Chisholm worked with Rees to develop these techniques, used at first only upon individuals, for use upon entire societies. Klein shows how such techniques were employed to further ruling class agendas after such emergencies as 9-11: but stops herself from arguing that such emergencies could have been false flag operations, which she terms “conspiracy theories”. She, unfortunately, has fallen prey to the ideology of the Lockdown Left. Hughes is not hindered by such hang-ups.
In their article, “Exit the WHO!” The WL writes that today the WHO is “a blunt instrument of global tyranny imposing deceitful and potentially deadly edicts”, and “a pillar of global capitalism, led by Western imperialism.” Given its sordid history, however, one is tempted to reply,
“So, nu?”
Notes:
iExit the WHO! At https://redfireonline.com/2024/02/17/exit-the-who/
iiWalter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 1940, at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
iiiStop The Great Reset! – Red Fire (redfireonline.com) at https://redfireonline.com/2020/12/16/stop-the-great-reset/
ivSee Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” The Family, ed. Ruth Anshen, 1949.
vSee https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d7ge4/you_should_never_hug_or_kiss_your_children_1928/#lightbox
viJohn Farley, Brock Chisholm, The World Heath Organization, and the Cold War, UBC Press, 2008; https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=81838
viiYou can download Hughes book for free at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41850-1. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Picador, 2008.