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The
Critical Art Ensemble's Biological Defense Program
Marching
Plague
By STAN COX
It's not clear what
qualifies an armament as a "weapon of mass destruction";
it doesn't seem to have much to do with the capacity to cause
mass destruction. Nuclear bombs certainly have that ability,
but their co-WMDs, chemical and biological weapons, can kill
only a fraction of a percent as many people as can nukes.
They're far less useful in a real fight than are conventional
weapons, and they're often more dangerous to their creator than
to the target.
But because they can cause gruesome results that old-fashioned
explosions, projectiles, and fire cannot, the three classes of
WMD do have in common an extraordinary capacity to terrify, and
that terror can be put to use not just by offically designated
terrorists but by all sides in a conflict. Biological weapons,
or rather perceived threats of them, are particularly effective
as a tool of government and military control.
A current work by the Critical Art Ensemble entitled "Marching
Plague"
mocks the notion that biological terror presents any serious
practical threat, arguing instead that extravagant spending of
tax dollars to defend against bioterror is no more than a means
of "maximizing profit and consolidating power through the
matrix of biocatastrophe."
Like all CAE efforts, "Marching Plague" advances on
several fronts at once (with an installation, a performance piece,
a film, and a book) and is not explicitly identified with any
individual artist. This time out, they've taken on an unwelcome
but highly effective artistic collaborator: the US Department
of Justice, which continues its pursuit of a two-year-old case
against one of the key artists behind the project, Steven Kurtz.
The prosecution of Kurtz is a work of political
theater
that starkly illuminates one of the chief arguments of "Marching
Plague": that microorganisms are practically useless as
weapons but are a highly effective tool for scaring a citizenry
into accepting tighter government and corporate control.
The FBI arrested Kurtz in 2004 on suspicion of bioterrorism,
and he was eventually indicted for mail and wire fraud; he is
still awaiting trial. In the raid on his home, agents confiscated
virtually all of the research materials for what would become
"Marching Plague", including an early draft of the
book. The property has never been returned, so Kurtz and
CAE have had to re-assemble everything from scratch. The
hardships imposed by federal persecution, far from deterring
CAE, have lent its work extra punch and immediacy. (For
the history and current status of Kurtz's ordeal, see www.caedefensefund.org).
In a Berlin gallery last year, CAE cut loose with one phase of
"Marching Plague", re-enacting a curious 1949 experiment
in which a US biowarfare group secretly introduced the near-harmless
bacterium Serratia marsescens into air
ducts in the Pentagon, successfully contaminating the building
and frightening generals into throwing more funds into biodefense.
Culture plates set out in the 2005 CAE exhibit indicated full
contamination of the gallery space as well.
The show presented no danger to anyone; similar demonstrations
have long been a staple of high school science fairs. But
CAE was well advised to hold this show in Europe, not in the
United States. This country is by now so well indoctrinated
in the formula 'bacteria = danger = weapon = terrorism' that
to display red bacterial cultures, sealed tightly in petri plates
but revealed in an unapproved political context, would quickly
bring down the heavy fist of the law. Indeed, S. marsescens is one of the
organisms Kurtz and University of Pittsburg professor Robert
Ferrell were indicted for obtaining fraudulently.
Also in 2005, CAE commemorated a British military exercise from
1952-53, designed to test whether ships' crews (represented by
guinea pigs) could be infected with the plague bacillus (represented
by the harmless bacterium Bacillus
subtilis) via aerosol spray. To, as they said, replay
the original tragedy as farce, CAE sprayed a broth containing
Bacillus subtilis from a boat
off the Scotland's Isle of Lewis toward a floating platform holding
30 guinea pigs and an animal-protection supervisor. "Our
results were as disappointing as the original experiment",
they report; coat swabs showed that only one animal was hit with
the spray, and none were infected. The Isle of Lewis tests are
the focus of a film that has shown, among other venues, at New
York's Whitney Biennial this spring.
Today, the research done by the US and other governments on bioweapons
is officially defensive, designed only to anticipate threats.
But in biowar, defensive and offensive research are identical
twins. As CAE puts it, defensive research works in this
way: "A technology exists only as a paranoid fantasy, but
then it is designed and manufactured so that the public can be
protected from it. The bizarre notion that the need to
neutralize a threat predates the threat itself is simply insane."
CAE's intention with the "Marching Plague" project
is not just to poke fun at half-century-old military fantasies
but to warn that in recent years, biowarfare research has "returned
to its glory days of the 1950s and 1960s", and in an even
more virulent form. The reasons for, and consequences of,
that revival are laid out in their book "Marching
Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health", which was issued
two months ago, close to the two-year anniversary of the FBI
raid on Kurtz's home.
The book argues, eloquently, that for organized armies and freelance
terrorists alike, biological weapons are militarily next to useless
-- but highly serviceable if the goal is to win "votes for
politicians, viewers and readers for the media, research funds
for Big Science and Medicine, a vastly expanding budget for the
military, and perhaps most importantly, the consolidation of
power for the dominant political party..."
The small book is filled with accounts from the past six decades
showing that the body count from any biological attack can generally
be done on one hand; the real casualties, argues CAE, are the
rights of citizens, as exemplified by the Kurtz case, as well
as the millions of people who die of preventable diseases every
year. Why would capitalism, famed for its ruthless efficiency,
tolerate the waste of billions of scarce dollars on defense against
a toothless threat like biowar? CAE's view:
"Capital has perverted the redeeming power of the nonrational
by stripping away anything positive that could emerge from it.
and leaving only its authoritarian possibilities. In the
case of public health, fighting disease and intensifying public
preparedness for real, ongoing health crises is no longer a valued,
humanitarian initiative; instead, we have a military flight of
fantasy that prioritizes the fantastic and improbable over the
real and certain."
What is real and certain? The global numbers given by CAE
are widely known and even more widely ignored:
Respiratory
infections: 4 million
Diarrheal diseases: 3 to 4 million
AIDS: 2.5 million
Malaria: 1 to 1.5 million
Measles: 1 to 1.5 million
Hepatitis B: 1 to 2 million
Such numbers
are irrelevant to the US government's National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has installed new, state-of-the-art
biosafety
level 3 and 4 labs at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, Fort
Detrick, Maryland, and at its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland
-- at, says CAE, a total cost of $358 million -- and has funded
Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious
Disease Research at Harvard, Duke, the Universities of Chicago,
Texas, and Washington, and five other universities. And,
asks CAE, what are the top priorities for NIAID research?
Smallpox: no
cases since the 1970s
Anthrax: 236 US cases between 1955 and 1999, and five deaths
in the 2001 attacks
Ebola: 683 known deaths since the first in 1976
As CAE notes,
683 deaths constitutes the work of "a typical hour"
for the team of AIDs and tuberculosis.
Meanwhile, the more research that's done on bioweapons -- either
"offensive" or "defensive" -- the higher
the death toll from those weapons. One outcome of "defensive"
research has been that bioweapons have killed fewer opponents
than members of the home team. By CAE's count, 419 US military
personnel became ill with biowar diseases through friendly-fire
accidents in the 1942-69 heyday of germ warfare spending.
In the 1970s and 1980s, with spending at its low ebb, the illness
count was 5.
CAE doesn't provide a body count for the 1990s, when spending
again escalated. Recall, however, that the anthrax used
in the 2001 attacks almost certainly originated in a US military
laboratory. With Pentagon spending on "biological
defense" having bloated up to $1.5
billion
in the House-passed version of the 2007 Defense Appropriations
Bill, more illness and death is, unfortunately, almost inevitable.
Unfortunately, "Marching Plague" will remain a work
of current relevance for years to come. And the government's
bio-comedic performance piece will continue its long run as well.
The prosecution of Kurtz and Ferrell grinds on, and the Department
of Homeland Security is still recommending that you and your
family stockpile plastic
and duct tape
in preparation for a terrorist attack that could, as they put
it, "send tiny microscopic 'junk' into the air".
Or you can take the view of the Critical Art Ensemble: that the
only "junk" in the air is the "symbolic abstraction
of fear" being pumped out by Homeland Security, the Pentagon,
and their private-sector pals.
Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kanas.
You can reach him at: t.stan@cox.net.
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