Communist Turkey Gennady Zyuganov Spreads Feather-Headed Canards About Bird Flu

Gennady Zyuganov, Communist Propagandist

"It's strange that not a single duck has yet died [from bird flu] in America - they are all dying in Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why."---Gennady Zyuganov 3-14-2006 [See also Johnson's Russia List, Canada Free Press]

As I noted previously on 3-19-2006, the defamatory charge that America practices biological warfare has historically been a staple of Soviet and Russian propaganda. Sometimes Americans like the ex-professor Ward Churchill and Senator Obama's pastor Rev. Wright have also promoted destructive and defamatory propaganda themes about genocidal biological warfare like those originally disseminated by the KGB.

During the 1980s, the communist media claimed that U.S. Army biowarfare scientists developed the AIDS virus at Fort Detrick, Maryland. [Walter Laqueur writes that during the 1980s and 1990s, radical Arab nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist propaganda put a new twist on this propaganda: Jews were accused of spreading AIDS and other diseases.]

In 2002, the head of the Russian intelligence service, Yevgeni Primakov, admitted that the KGB had promoted the lie that the Americans developed AIDS.

In March 2006, the bird-brained Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who used to be a high-ranking party propagandist and not a scientist, claimed that America is spreading bird flu. His lie is reminiscent of the medieval canard that Jews poison wells.

Zyuganov claimed:

"The forms of warfare are changing. It's strange that not a single duck has yet died in America - they are all dying in Russia and European countries. This makes one seriously wonder why," Zyuganov said at a press conference at the Interfax main office on Tuesday...

Asked to be more precise as to whether he believes the bird flu outbreak could be a deliberate attack by the U.S., Zyuganov answered positively."I not only suggest this, I know very well how this can be arranged. There is nothing strange here," he said [Interfax March 14, 2006].

Zyuganov also spreads feather-headed canards about Jews and once opined:

The Jewish diaspora, which traditionally controlled the financial life of the continent, began expanding its own market by becoming the bearer of the controlling pocket of shares in the complete industrial-economic system of Western civilization.

Zyuganov's mendacious theories about the genesis of bird flu have been discredited by Russian scientists, as this article in the Canada Free Press (10-16-2006) shows:

A group of scientists from Russia made a U.S.-sponsored visit to American influenza labs last March to learn more about tracking emerging flu viruses.

Until August of 2005, when an outbreak of bird flu was discovered in Central Siberia, Russia had been considered free of the virus.

Unlike Zyuganov, Russian researchers, who said the virus was the same one that has caused concern in Southeast Asia, believe the avian flu was carried into Russia by migratory wild birds.

Although Zyuganov claimed in 2006 that the Americans are responsible for the bird flu, most Russian scientists at that time believed that the bird flu was brought to Russia by migratory birds. The Russian scientists were trying to solve the mystery of this dangerous disease, not exploit its appearance for political purposes.

In 2006 there was also another theory that domestic fowl are the principal carriers. Dr. Richard Thomas, an expert at Birdlife International, observed:

From the pattern of spread that we saw last autumn the spread [of the disease] just did not follow known migration routes. What it did follow, you can trace it from western China across to Eastern Europe," he says. "And you see a good correlation with the transport routes, with the railway that runs from Lanchow city heading west through Kazakhstan and southern Russia right away across to Romania.

I think ignorant people like Communist ideologue Gennadi Zyuganov, ex-professor Ward Churchill, and Senator Obama's pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright damage our country's reputation, scholarship, science, and people's health with their conspiracy theories.

These unscientific, bigoted charlatans get rich and powerful by promoting their lies in speeches and on tapes like the snake-oil salesmen of the old days. Anti-American propagandists should let the scientists do the research about diseases and stop spreading ignorant prejudices disguised as scholarship.

Phill Wilson, the executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, has observed:

[Conspiracy theories are] a huge barrier to HIV prevention in black communities...There's an issue around conspiracy theory and urban myths. Thus we have an epidemic raging out of control, and African Americans are being disproportionately impacted in every single sense...[Black] adolescents ages 18 to 24 accounted for nearly 80 percent of new HIV cases. The whole notion of conspiracy theories and misinformation...removes personal responsibility...If there is this boogeyman, people say, 'Why should I use condoms? Why should I use clean needles?' And if I'm an organization, 'Why should I bother with educating my folks?' The [Tuskegee] syphilis study was real, but it happened 40 years ago, and holding on to it is killing us.