The Demonstration Scam

Harry Pollard

[An unpublished commentary, 30 June, 1981]

This is Harry Pollard's "Ten Minutes". Afterwards the time is yours.

Some 18,000 people anxious to prove they can survive, listened a week or two ago to 6 hours of group therapy at the Hollywood Bowl. Their cost was high. Not only had they to pay as much as $50 to get in, but they were also required to listen to earnest speeches against nuclear power.

The organisers say they made about $50,000 from the event. This doesn't seem much from 18,000 people paying a minimum $8 to see entertainers who were working free. Either the arithmetic of the Alliance for Survival is as poor as some of their arguments, or they must have spent a lot of money to get the Bowl filled.

From all accounts, the program was pretty well put together with a maximum of music and a minimum of talk. Among the words, were those of Patti and Bobby. Both the Reagan and Kennedy issue made an issue of nuclear power, but kept mum about nuclear weapons.

This gathering of the clans wrote a scenario that over the years has proven most attractive to the revolutionary dilettante. Public demonstration against evil is by far the easiest avenue of commitment to a cause. It doesn't require that you spend much. You don't actually have to work at anything. The place of commitment is generally pretty pleasant, filled with warm bodies, hot music, few cold facts, but plenty of cold chills to titillate the participants. The chills are provided by cliff hanging, bloodcurdling stories of ultimate disaster, in which Red Riding Hood is imminently the brunch of the wolf who is almost always incorporated and multinational. The important point of these clambakes is that the participant can be a faceless fanatic. Unrecognised and unknown. Rather like the audience at a rock concert, which is how most of the protest gatherings shape up.

Sometimes they are amusing. The horde that dutifully surrounds San Onof re nuclear plant on sunny weekends treks back home to San Diego. There, in the harbor, are probably not only a number of nuclear reactors aboard carriers and submarines, but a whole slew of hot weaponry practically poised for take-off. It would make much more sense for these people to live at San Onof re and demonstrate in San Diego. It would certainly be safer. But, good sense and safety have little to do with demonstrations against nuclear power.

Getting people into the streets to show solidarity is what is important. It has all the reasonableness and sense of high purpose of a lynch mob. The street people are jollied, entertained, exhorted and generally amused right up to the body count. For, that is the purpose of the exercise. To produce a body count. Not, a mind count, but a body count. Success of a demonstration is measured by bodies. This is why there are so many arguments about the size of mob. The pros count high, the cons count low. 'Numbers' is the name of the game. If you were there, you were there to be counted -- not to be heard.

It appears the organizers of these affairs are quite callous about the need for high sales figures. Joan Baez was severely taken to task for introducing a disturbing issue -- the boat people -- when anti-nuclear promoters believed they had finally touched a nerve that would scare people out of their cars and into the streets. They were annoyed that Joan might becloud the non-issue with her concern for people who were actually dying.

Certainly, at the demonstrations, there are people who are able to think properly about nuclear power and its alternatives. But, they are a minority, for they are not really necessary. Ten dumb bodies are better than one good mind, so this is the direction of all promotion.

I suppose, I became conscious of this kind of operation a few years ago on KPFK when I did a Commentary on DDT. The substance of the talk was that DDT didn't seem all that bad. The reaction from listeners was immediate -- a surprise and a delight. I was accused of everything except eating babies. One lady said I'd set back the environmental movement 15 years. That's a year for each minute of commentary. Not too bad, I thought. The point she, and others, were making was that the masses had been spooked and any attempt to turn the stampede was practically a crime against nature. It was an experience of the elitest left -- or perhaps I should say, the elitest liberals. I'm not sure how sinister they are these days. But, liberal or left, their concern for people seemed much like the cowboy's concern for his cattle. They were dirty, smelly beasts -- but the bonus depended on getting them to market.

Anyway, the reaction piqued my interest. I looked further into the DDT issue and came to the conclusion that it was probably the best, the cheapest and certainly the safest pesticide ever invented.

Now, everyone knew that this wasn't so. People were crying havoc in the streets, protesting the deadly pesticide. But, their activities were not influenced by good evidence, or common sense. Rather, they were the targets, and victims, of propaganda batteries hurling emotional salvoes into their hearts and minds. Rachel Carson was a typical member of the firing squad.

In Silent Spring, she set a pattern by bringing together a brilliant combination of fact and fantasy to prove the danger of DDT. In the chapter, 'And no birds Sing' a picture was drawn of the silent wood without the sound of a robin. The birds were gone. The mood was excruciatingly developed, pointing to DDT's horrendous effect on the songbirds.

Yet, the Audubon Society's Field Notes -- from which she quoted -- published the bird counts for robins and other species in 1960, as the book was being written. The Society -- which, incidentally is anti-DDT --found 12 times as many robins in 1960 as there were 20 years earlier, before DOT. If birds were being wiped out, one would expect fewer of them. But, there were more, twelve times more. If DOT was as widespread as Rachel deplored, the robins were apparently thriving on it.

In fact, most of the feathered species counted showed increases during the DOT years. There was no evidence of serious effect from the pesticide. Oh, and lo put your minds to rest about the raptors -- the hawks, eagles and so on, the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary count also showed considerable increases over the yean. In fact, even as DDT was killing off practically everything, the birds, the wild animal harvests, the fish catches, were all increasing.

My conclusions about DDT didn't, and doesn't, mean that I'm an advocate of widespread use of pesticides. My interest was that an issue hot enough to flush people into the streets was pretty much a complete lie. The real target on the hidden agenda, was corporate America. Ironically, DDT was replaced by more dangerous substances, which gave a profit bonanza to the chemical companies. Replacement chemicals cost 4 times as much as the banned DDT and required 3 sprayings instead of one. Thus, chemical company profits rose by 12 times (or more, for DDT was a low profit item). I bet that wasn't the intention of the Sierra Club, or the sincere people galloping off in all directions.

You must wonder why so many people so easily swallowed such false notions. Why they were so alarmed by stories of the general extinction of birds, when ail they had to do was to check the bird counts. It might be argued that we are masochistic. That we are attracted by visions of the inevitability of doom. Paul Ehrlich, who has built a career around dire and often strange prophecy, has a new book called, I believe, 'Extinction'. You surely can't get more frightening than that. Paul has taken the place of the old-time hell-raising preacher who told us where we would go if we didn't eat our spinach. His self appointed task is to give us guilt feelings when we become too happy.

Yet, his books may indicate the real problem. We rely, too much, on leaders to tell us what is true. And we have lost the capacity to question them. These leaders have the very best reason for being persuasive -- they want to remain leaders. And just as that archetypal leader, Adolf Hitler, needed ever greater hyperbole and ever more extensive demands for lebensraum -- so also do our new leaders find themselves caught by the need always to come up with a wilder statement, a fresher fantasy, a new enemy. So, nuclear power is elected. This is the issue to get the rabble into the streets and around the guillotines.

The secret for seducing these innocents, as was demonstrated by Rachel Carson, is to season every inaccuracy with a just a soupcon of fact. Just enough good evidence to make the nonsense palatable. And once a leader is accepted, he can say almost anything. His words will be rapturously swallowed, his slogans enthusiastically repeated.

This is why the mobs sang their 'sieg heil, sieg heil' in the thirties and why they chant 'no nukes, no nukes' in the eighties. The slogans are part of a mindless psychiatric catharsis. People feel a lot better, a lot less guilty. And they've achieved their temporary Nirvana with enjoyable ease.

But, surely, no-one is pro-MAD -- pro 'Mutually Assured Destruction' -- pro-nuclear weapons? Well, this is a different issue from that of nuclear power. The only reason to mix them together is to cook the books. The cook mixes together a genuine problem with a non-problem to produce a stew which can be fed to the less than critical partisans.

Thus, military waste is not separated from reactor waste, which is a small part of the whole. Last time I looked at the figures, one year of military waste was greater than all the power station waste of the previous quarter century. And military stuff is hot, whereas some 99% of the nuclear reactor waste isn't. It's mostly pretty low level and pretty unimportant.

But, stir the wastes together and we have a lot of trouble to shoot at, trouble that by a kind of osmosis, becomes a power reactor problem. Thus, the argument against nuclear power becomes strong because the ability of people to reason and weigh facts is weak.

A final amusing story about DDT. The government carried out tests on workers at the Torrance DDT plant. Men had been exposed for a decade or two to enormous concentrations of DDT. Two significant results were noted. The workers had more children than aver age, and there had not been a single case of cancer, when statistically there should have been. You know, it just might be that not only is DDT a cancer inhibitor, but it may also be a fertility drug!

This is Harry Pollard's "Ten Minutes". The other five are yours. Why don't you make use of them?