Читать книгу The Zombie Book - Nick Redfern - Страница 11

When, in a wholly fictional setting, a zombie outbreak begins, it is usually accompanied by massive amounts of fear and hysteria. In real life, perhaps the closest thing to have ever mirrored that same fictional hysteria and fear came in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began. Over-the-top demands, to the effect that the infected should be rounded up and placed in isolation, circulated widely and wildly. Crazed, religious types asserted loudly that AIDS—Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome—was God’s very own, unique way of punishing homosexuals for their “sins.” There was mass confusion—just about everywhere—on how infection could be contained or spread.

These issues and concerns are all remarkably similar to—in fact, almost identical to—those that we have seen in movies, novels, comic-books and television productions of the undead variety. There is another parallel between AIDS and zombies, too: the theory that the virus—whether in reality or in fiction—was created by top secret U.S. government experimentation gone disastrously wrong.

History has shown, however, that with regard to AIDS, the original allegations to this effect surfaced from disinformation spread by experts and psychological-warfare operatives within the heart of the former Soviet Union’s KGB. Background data on the KGB’s involvement in spreading rumors—to the effect that the U.S. government deliberately engineered HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) as a weapon of biological warfare to wipe out significant numbers of the population—were addressed in a 2005 paper prepared by the U.S. Department of State. Titled AIDS as a Biological Weapon, it notes:

“When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists exploited this situation as well as the musings of conspiracy theorists to help shape their brief but highly effective disinformation campaign on this issue.

“In March, 1992, then-Russian intelligence chief, and later Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon. The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported on March 19, 1992:

“‘[Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing U.S. scientists’ ‘crafty’ plots were fabricated in KGB offices. The Soviets eventually abandoned the AIDS disinformation campaign under pressure from the U.S. government in August 1987.”

These particular revelations from the Department of State lead us to an interesting possibility. Currently, there are huge numbers of conspiracy-based stories on the Internet, all telling of a looming, real-life zombie outbreak that will result from top secret medical- and virology-based programs initiated by U.S. authorities. Most people might be inclined to dismiss such scenarios as the work of tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatics. But, maybe that’s not the case after all. Perhaps they are the work of hostile forces working to provoke anxiety across a land that is now obsessed with, and by, zombies. After all, if the Soviet Union’s KGB could have done it so successfully with the AIDS virus in the 1980s, perhaps shadowy forces in the Age of Terror are doing likewise with the zombie virus.