If swine flu follows the route of its 1918-19 predecessor, receding over the summer, then coming back in a more virulent version next winter, it could get serious. The great Spanish influenza pandemic after World War I infected 500 million people, more than one-quarter of the human race at that time, and it had a death rate of 10 percent, which eventually caused 50 million deaths. That was five times the total death toll of World War I. The 1918-19 pandemic killed more Americans than World War I and World War II combined.

But so far, the current swine flu "pandemic's" most interesting aspect is as a rehearsal for one of fourth-generation war's most dangerous threats, the release of a genetically engineered plague.

Genetic engineering is a hideous technology, crafted in Mordor -- the mythical land synonymous with evil that J.R.R. Tolkien created in his beloved fantasy classic "The Lord of the Rings."

Honest blunders will be enough to unleash plagues on crops, critters -- honeybees may have already been hit -- and man. But ultimately, genetic engineering deliberately used for evil offers Brave New World its final, almost inescapable control mechanism.

Like every other technology man has invented, genetic engineering will also be used in war. I have argued for years that a genetically engineered plague, a disease no one ever saw before and against which there are no defenses, could replicate what the Black Death brought to medieval Europe.

Such a weapon could kill far more people than a single thermonuclear weapon or even several nukes. Worse, while building nuclear weapons requires vast facilities, genetic engineering is knowledge-based. No non-state entity will be able to build a fission or fusion weapon -- though they may buy or steal one -- but they will be able to genetically engineer deadly diseases, if they can't already.

Let us imagine, for a moment, that the ongoing swine flu epidemic were a deliberate rehearsal for release of a genetically engineered plague. What would be the lessons so far?

First, the main target, the United States, offers a wonderful incubator right next door in the nation of Mexico.

Mexico has densely populated slums, a culture in which life is lived socially, outside the home, and typical Third World standards of public health. Getting a plague started is tricky. It needs to achieve critical mass before it is detected. Mexico is just the petri dish that a fourth-generation war attacker wanting to destroy the United States would need.

However, if that should happen, the Washington establishment will not even attempt to close the U.S.-Mexico border until it is too late. Spokesmen for the Obama administration said that an epidemic was preferable to the economic damage border closure would create. They would realize, too late, how wrong they were if the disease were a genetically engineered plague.

earlier related report
Military Matters: Bio-war terror -- Part 2
Getting a plague started is tricky. It needs to achieve critical mass before it is detected. Mexico is just the petri dish that a fourth-generation war attacker wanting to destroy the United States would need.

An article in The Washington Post on Sunday noted, "Mexican scientists said the virus has been spreading primarily within families and among co-workers, often in dense, poor neighborhoods of Mexico City."

The Post quoted Mexican epidemiologist Miguel Angel Lezana as saying, "When you have this huge accumulation with crowded people in a rather small area, you have a greater opportunity to spread the disease."

Lezana added, "Besides, it's an area -- in general -- of low-income, poor people, urban poor, very crowded, so those might be some of the main explanations."

The Washington establishment will not even attempt to close the U.S.-Mexico border until it is too late. Spokesmen for the Obama administration said that an epidemic was preferable to the economic damage border closure would create. They would realize, too late, how wrong they were if the disease were a genetically engineered plague.

"Too late" means a win for fourth-generation war. The rehearsal shows the border will remain open, with vast movement of people, legally and illegally, between the United States and Mexico. Moving a plague northward, once Mexico has served its incubator function, will not be difficult.

Americans, driven by sensation-seeking media, will panic. Panic is a reasonable response to a plague; one of the best ways to survive the Black Death was to get out of town as soon as it appeared. But panic will help a fourth-generation war attacker achieve what might be his main objective, serious damage to the American economy, even if public health measures succeed in containing the plague without major population loss. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida, has said that al-Qaida's main target is the American economy since that is what Americans seem to care most about.

Could the swine flu epidemic in fact be a trial run for an attack by a genetically engineered plague? Might the swine flu have been deliberately created for a test? The answer is almost certainly no, although at this point scientists do not know how this version of flu arose.

But "objectively," as a Marxist would say, it is a test nonetheless. The U.S. government would be wise to regard it as such and grade our response carefully.

To date, the U.S. government and the Obama administration have gotten an F, largely because of the establishment's refusal to consider closing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The only effective immediate response to a genetically engineered plague is likely to be quarantine. Quarantines start with border controls. The United States and other countries used to know that, and they routinely closed borders and quarantined arriving travelers when epidemics were loose.

However, in our 21st century Brave New World, the dominant globalist ideology, which is shared by both the Republican and the Democratic political parties that control the United States, rejects border controls as hostile to its vision of "one world." In a century when genetically engineered plagues will serve as weapons of mass destruction, that ideology may literally prove to be the death of the American people.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)

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