Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 1 December 2003

Circle of Poison is the title of a malicious book co-authored by David Weir and Mark Schapiro. It was sponsored and published in 1981 by the left-wing Institute of Food Development Policy (IFDP).

The subject was the chemical industry, and the title says it all. Even after all these years, the chemical industry still doesn't grasp the damage this book has done, and is still doing, to the industry. (I sometimes wonder if it ever will.)

Enter the ideology of it all — again. This propaganda project was set up by the Washington-based Marxist Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and acts as one of its fronts. The IPS is notorious for its pro-communist (yes, even in today's post communist world) and anti-Western views and it support for the arbitrary arrest and summary executions by Castro of those who oppose his regime. The IPS also cooperated with the KGB, the Stasi and Castro's DGI (Cuban equivalent of the KGB) and has supported numerous terrorist organisations.

The IFDP also acts under the influence of eight Cuban ministries, in particular Cuba's Vice-President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez and even the sadistic Castro himself.

Weir is also executive director for the Center for Investigative Reporting which is another creature of the Marxist –Leninist IPS,

The treacherous nature of the IPS was neatly summed up by Brian Crozier (a fellow of the prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict) when he wrote:

"The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB."

Well, the Soviets and the murderous KGB are now history but the IPS is still fighting the malicious fight and its influence is as insidious as ever. You see, the IPS was never so much a tool of the KGB as a sort of Quisling helping to form a fifth column in the US. To use a biblical setting: it sees itself as Sampson and American capitalism as the temple of the Philistines. Once the temple is brought crashing down the New Socialist Age of superabundance and perfect human harmony can begin. This is the kind of cultist thinking that passes for policy debates among these callous and self-deluded utopians.

No kidding, they really believe this nonsense. And it makes them very dangerous. After Schapiro and Weir had an article on toxic waste published in Mother Jones Joe Collins, an IPS fellow, hired them to expand their theme into a book. The result was the toxic Circle of Poison.

Dark Circle's relentless and dishonest propaganda mercilessly hammered the chemical industry, especially the production of pesticides. It falsely accused the industry of creating masses of landless labourers, of reinforcing feudal structures, of raising food prices, of endangering the health of producers and consumers by using hazardous chemicals and of creating and profiting from hunger.

Fortunately it spared us stories of corporate death camps, torture chambers, firing squads, bacteriological warfare experiments on political prisoners, probably because this is what Castro does. As always, with the moral cretins of the left, crime is defined by those who do it and to hell with the victims.

(All this from people who callously dehumanise the masses as the untermenschen or just simply "pollution units.")

The success of the book stunned the authors and the IFDP alike. (I guess even they didn't realise how many dummies with degrees really existed. Within eighteen months it had enabled this pair of 'progressive' activists to spawn a global network of organisations starting with the Malaysian Pesticide Action Network (PAN). It really should have been called death to the lower orders, except for our household staff. Well even the super duper people produce dirty laundry.

The sole object of this network is to wage war against agribusiness and agro-chemical companies. As Weir and Schapiro concluded: "...unless all of a society's important decisions — including economic decisions like the development and marketing of agricultural chemicals — are made more democratically, the majority will suffer."

This is code for decisions made by the inner party. Meaning the same totalitarian structure that brutally murdered over 100,000 million people during the 20th century, turning North Korea into a massive death camp, Cambodia into a charnel house, Lenin, Trotsky's and Stalin's Soviet Union into a vast network of death camps that murdered over 20 million people. China into the world's greatest exponent of mass murder, killing more than 50,000,000 of its own peoples.

Any group that can support an ideology knowing of its massive and unparalleled crimes against humanity and supporting its unconstrained reign of terror are guilty of participating in mass murder. I thinks it's time that this nest of vipers that calls itself the Institute for Policy Studies was thoroughly investigated, along with its fellow travellers, by a Congressional Committee.

Gerry Jackson is Brookes' economics editor