“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”- Adolf Hitler
Want to get people to believe a lie? It's simple. Make up a story, distort the facts, add a drop of truth and they'll follow you like the mice that followed the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
- Steve LeMaster
If you should find yourself perusing Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", one thing you might notice are the titles she gave some of the chapters in her book, “Rivers of Death,” ”The Human Price,” “The Rumblings of an Avalanche,” and “Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.” This is typical of anyone who wants to get a message out of untold horrors, whether it's in a work of fiction or nonfiction. It's designed to prepare the reader for what follows in the pages of that chapter, so what better way than to give them titles that portend death and destruction?
Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907 and worked for the US Bureau of Fisheries in the 1950's, she was also a nature writer and an environmentalist. Her 1951 book, "The Sea Around Us" became a best seller and secured her financially. In 1962, she published a book that would cause widespread controversy to this very day titled "Silent Spring". Many claim that it started the environmental movement. Filled with half truths, distortions and outright lies, her book caused a reversal of the use of DDT by the United Nations that caused the deaths of millions of people in Africa. According to the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 2.7 million people die annually of malaria.[1]
Carson starts her first lie right away in the dedication to Albert Schweitzer, "To Albert Schweitzer who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’” An acquaintance of mine steered me to page 262 of his autobiography. So, I go to the public library find the book and lo and behold, "How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us ... but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us."
That's interesting. She dedicates her book to Albert Schweitzer, who is more concerned about nuclear warfare than anything else, but, has his hopes set on DDT for those wicked insects? Had she even bothered to check out his autobiography first, she would most likely not have made this error. Sadly, her book is replete with it.
And she wastes little time trying to link insecticides to chemicals used for warfare prior to World War II:
All this has come about because of the sudden rise and the prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents for death of man.[2]
What she is trying to do is link insecticides to those chemicals used in warfare. By doing so, she is laying a foundation that DDT was tested as an agent "for the death of man" when it was used for nothing of the sort. DDT was first synthesized in 1873, but its insecticidal properties were not discovered until 1939, by the Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his efforts. It was hailed as a major public health success because DDT kills mosquitoes, lice and fleas, which are carriers for more than 20 serious infectious diseases like the bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, encephalitis and malaria.[3] It's also known to be non-hazardous to humans! Considering that volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse affects.[4]
She goes on by asserting that insecticides that were used before World War II were simple, organic compounds that were naturally occurring and lists a variety. However, two of those in her list are actually complex organic chemicals, pyrethrum and rotenone.[5] She then goes on to state that arsenic is a carcinogen and links it to the deaths of many English citizens due to chimney soot, which is supported by an anonymous English physician two centuries ago. She then paints a horrific scene of sickness and death among humans and animals.[6] What's of interest here is that on the following page, she goes out of her way to make sure the reader knows that DDT is the deadliest.[7]
Modern insecticides are still more deadly. The vast majority fall into one or two large groups of chemicals. One, represented by DDT, is known as the "chlorinated hydrocarbons."
This indictment of DDT is a travesty and a downright misrepresentation of the facts, better known as pseudo or junk science. As noted earlier, volunteers ingested as much as 35 grams of DDT for two years and not one of them suffered any adverse side effects. Not to mention that millions of people lived with the chemical for years during the mosquito spray programs in 1956.[8] Moreover, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, "In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable."[9] A leading British scientist stated, "If the pressure groups had succeeded, if there had been a world ban on DDT, then Rachel Carson and Silent Spring would now be killing more people in a single year than Hitler killed in his whole holocaust."
And this last statement sums it up eloquently. What Rachel Carson's book did was nothing short of causing hysterics, which resulted in knee jerk reactions by politicians and bureaucrats in the United Nations to cease the use of DDT. As with any politician, all they care about is getting reelected and typically fall into lockstep with the noise created by alarmists with a complete disregard for the consequences. In this case millions of preventable deaths around the world, or what we call today as genocide.
Then there is the myth of the near extinction of the Bald Eagle caused by DDT. This myth claims that DDT killed these magnificent birds and caused the shells of eggs to become thin, yet as early as 1921 the journal called Ecology reported that Bald Eagles were under threat of extinction 22 years before DDT was even invented. According to the National Museum Bulletin, they all but vanished in the New England area by 1937, which was 10 years prior to widespread use of pesticides.
In an article posted by the Associated Press on July 4, 2006, it was reported that Bald Eagle pairs increased from 3 to 100 between 1983 and 2006. They go on to mention that, "DDT poisoned the birds, killing some adults and making the eggs of those that survived thin. The thin eggs dramatically reduced the chances of eaglets surviving to adulthood. DDT was banned in 1972. The next year, the Endangered Species Act passed and the bald eagles began their dramatic recovery."
The problem is that nowhere has it ever been reported that Bald Eagles were considered as a nuisance and routinely shot by hunters, fisherman and farmers. This is what nearly caused the Bald Eagle's demise and compelled the government to enact a federal law protecting the bird in 1940. The AP, of course, underplaying these facts. Since that time, the Bald Eagle population has dramatically increased.
What was the actual cause of these egg shells thinning? A variety of reasons. Some of them already in the scientific literature prior to an Environmental Protection Agency administrative judge, William Ruckleshaus who presided over the 1971-1972 hearings about whether DDT should be banned.
Lastly, I would like to mention the real reason why DDT was banned. The reason was nothing more than control. In a Seattle Times newspaper (Oct. 5, 1969 edition), senior scientist for the ultra radical Environmental Defense Fund, Charles Wurster stated, "If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT."
I like to call it genocide via environmental alarmism.
So, it had nothing whatever to do with banning DDT for it's "deadly" properties. It was always about control.
References cited:
[1] National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
[2] Silent Spring Page 16
[3] Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide Frontpage Magazine. By: Lisa Makson July 31, 2003
[4] EVALUATION OF THE TOXICITY OF PESTICIDE RESIDUES IN FOOD - FAO Meeting Report No. PL/1965/10/1 WHO/Food Add./27.65
[5] Silent Spring page 16
[6] ibid page 17
[7] ibid page 18
[8] Mosquito Control Program Description
[9] National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - RE-EMERGING MICROBES
For a more in-depth history of DDT, visit Chemistry Daily - DDT
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