Somehow, it seems strangely appropriate that the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic - who has just been arrested after evading justice for 13 years - should have been holed up in Belgrade working (under excessive amounts of facial hair) as a practicioner of ‘alternative medicine’. The Guardian charitably refers to Karadzic as a ‘doctor’, but the website of the clinic where he was working has a distinct air of quackery about it. Much of the text is in Serbo-Croat, but we can deduce from the logo that Karadzic’s dayjob may have had something to do with “human quantum energy”.

The inherently fraudulent character of much of what purports to be an ‘alternative’ form of medicine has been well covered elsewhere. But less well-documented has been the odd relationship between ‘alternative medicine’ advocates and the dizzying conspiracy theories around HIV and AIDS. For several years during the early part of this decade, the South African government, under the influence of such theories, attempted to block the distribution of lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs. Professor Nicolli Nattrass, an economist at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, has estimated that this delay may have cost upwards of 340,000 lives. If she is right, then it seems possible that the South African government’s dalliance with the ‘alternative’ theories on HIV and AIDS may have dwarfed even Radovan Karadzic’s genocidal excesses.

One of the oddest cases I came across while researching “Don’t Get Fooled Again” was that of Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, Stalin’s “barefoot scientist”, who must rank as one of the greatest fraudsters of the modern age.

Lysenko, an agronomist by training, first rose to prominence in the late 1920s, when the Soviet state newspaper Pravda credited him with “turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow”. He managed to hold sway over Soviet science for most of the next four decades, less because of his scientific abilities than for his talents in self-promotion - and for the ruthless way that he dealt with his enemies.

Lysenko managed to present himself as the embodiment of a Communist ideal, the “barefoot scientist”, a peasant genius whose expertise derived not, primarily, from books, but from his practical understanding of the problems facing the Soviet worker, born of his own toil in the fields. His theories were likewise very agreeable to the Communist authorities, both in spirit and in consequence. Lysenko argued that, just as human nature could - as the Soviets believed - be fundamentally remoulded by the application of Marxist-Leninist principles, so the nature of plants could be transformed by the application of Lysenkoism. Wheat could be “trained” to thrive under Arctic conditions, simply by soaking the seeds in freezing water. Lysenko also rejected as “bourgeois” the Darwinist idea that organisms of the same species would naturally compete for resources. He insisted that, on the contrary, crops  that were sowed very close together - be they pea plants or apple trees - would in fact co-operate with each other, and thrive, through a kind of agricultural “class solidarity”.

But there was one very big problem with these theories: they didn’t work. And when they began to be put into practice, lots of people starved. But the famines of the early 1930s seem to have done little to dent Lysenko’s reputation.

When statistical analysis by other Soviet scientists found no evidence to support his claims, Lysenko stepped up his use of inflammatory and politicised rhetoric. He declared that ”mathematics has no relevance to biology - that is why we biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations that confirm the useless statistical formulas of the Mendelists”. Lysenko rejected whole swathes of work as “bourgeois pseudo-science”, flatly denied the existence of genes as a bourgeois invention, and denounced geneticists as “fly-lovers and people haters”.  In a speech before Stalin in 1935, Lysenko announced that “a class enemy is always an enemy whether he is a scientist or not”. “Bravo, comrade Lysenko!” came the response from the Soviet leader.

Over the next few years, Lysenko and his followers became increasingly vicious in their attacks on their fellow scientists. The geneticists Muralov, Meister and finally one of the country’s leading lights, Nikolai Vavilov, were arrested and jailed. Many others followed, with those who were not deliberately killed often dying in prison, as Vavilov did in 1943. Lysenko, meanwhile, was made President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and subsequently became - ironically - head of the Institute of Genetics within the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Lysenko’s influence in the USSR began to decline after the death of Stalin, but his ideas had begun to spread beyond the Soviet Union. China’s Mao Zedong, in particular, was inspired by the claimed successes of Lysenko’s theories in the USSR, and in 1958 sought to make them a key component of his “Great Leap Forward”. This was a plan to transform Chinese industry and agriculture, by the application of Communist principles, with the aim of economically surpassing the capitalist West within 15 years.  Along with Lysenko ideas about “close planting”, Mao sought to impose the collectivisation of farming, and orchestrated a nationwide campaign to kill every sparrow in China. These measures failed disastrously - agricultural production plummeted Although the extermination of sparrows meant that there were fewer birds eating grain, there were also fewer birds eating locusts. Much of the food that had survived Mao’s efforts to revolutionise agriculture was devoured amid the worst Chinese locust plague in living memory. Historians estimate that more than 20 million people may have died before the Great Leap Forward was abandoned, in 1961. While Lysenko’s ideas were only one component of the disaster, they certainly will not have helped.

Lysenko’s downfall finally came in 1964, following a speech by the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, at the General Assembly of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Among Soviet scientists, physicists enjoyed a relatively priveleged position due to their importance to the country’s nuclear programme, and were thus one of the few groups able to speak openly. Sakharov accused Lysenko of being “responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists”. The dam had broken, and within months the Academy of Sciences carried out a damning investigation into Lysenko’s work, which largely destroyed his reputation.

Yet Lysenko’s fate was in sharp contrast to that of his victims. Where Vavilov and his fellow geneticists had been imprisoned or killed, Lysenko was allowed to live out a comfortable retirement, dying in relative obscurity in 1976.

Lysenko was very much a creature of the Soviet era, but he has many heirs. In “Don’t Get Fooled Again” I explore some of the parallels between Trofim Lysenko and his modern-day successors.

Less well-known than the ubiquitous 9/11 conspiracy theories, but equally offensive to those personally affected, are the persistent “7/7 truthers”, who claim that the July 7th 2005 London bombings were - or could have been - carried out by UK government agents. Or that the explosions were not actually bombings at all but were caused by a “power surge”.  

Like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, the 7/7ers  characterise themselves as “sceptics”, and seek to advance their alternative theory by presenting minor inaccuracies in official statements as gaping holes, demanding answers to more or less unanswerable questions, or by smearing eyewitnesses as government stooges.

There are even 7/7 conspiracy theorists who seize on the weaknesses in claims made by other 7/7 conspiracy theorists, as evidence not that the whole thing is baloney, but rather that their rivals are themselves government stooges, who are out to “throw you off the trail with half-baked theories. While giving conspiracy theory a bad name”.

Rosemary Topping overlooks the beautiful Wye valley, near the also-interestingly-named Symond’s Yat Rock, the former sounding like a Delia Smith recipe and the latter like a long-forgotten music genre from the mid 1970s. People also go paintballing there, apparently…

The most heart-wrenching account of brutality that I’ve ever heard was the testimony given by Janvier Mudagiri at the August 2006 commemoration of the attack that had taken place at the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi two years earlier. Janvier recounted how, after the initial onslaught, in which the attackers hunted down and killed every Banyamulenge Tutsi they could find, everything went quiet. A little while later, a group of men returned, calling out that they had come to rescue whoever was still alive. Janvier, who was hiding in the ruins of the camp with a group of children, realised quickly that these were not rescuers, but killers, bent on finishing off what they had started. But amid the chaotic situation, he was unable to stop a number of the children from running out towards their pretended rescuers - and could do nothing but watch as they were gunned down.  

This year’s commemoration event, which is being organised by Ubuntu, the international peacebuilding group founded by those who lost loved ones at Gatumba, will take place at the office of Amnesty International UK, on:

Saturday 16th August, from 1.30pm.

The full address is:

The Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA.

A number of the survivors will be joining the commemoration, and Ubuntu campaigners will be discussing both the ongoing struggle for justice, and the measures that need to be taken to stem the flood of lethal weapons into Central Africa.  

Lisa Gee is great - and I’m not just saying that because we share an agent. She’s one of these writers who runs directly counter to the grumpy-oddball stereotype - positive, upbeat, outgoing; all those things that an author isn’t supposed to be. Every once in a while a group of us gets together to compare notes. The last time around I was intrigued to learn that Dora, Lisa’s six-year old daughter, had landed a part in the ”Sound of Music”, and was playing to packed-out audiences in the West End.  Not only this, but Lisa, having found herself immersed in a world of auditions, late nights and the occasional tantrum,  was already well on her way to writing a book about the experience of being a “Stage Mum”. Having been lucky enough to see some of the early notes, I’m very much looking forward to reading the final version, which comes out on July 3rd.

I’ve never actually been to Cold Christmas, but there was a turning on the road to Barley (where my grandparents lived) which we drove past every time, with a sign pointing the way. From the map, it looks as if some of the neighbouring villages were also quite oddly-named…

My friend Paul just sent me a link to an amusing new collaborative project which aims to come up with a comprehensive roster of “every brilliant thing”. The resulting list will then be used to help create an innovative, yet-to-be-revealed, installation art exhibit. Examples range from ”People falling over (but not hurting themselves)” to ”Aromatic duck pancakes with hoi sin sauce” and ”The word ‘haberdashery’”. Anyone can contribute, so I added a couple of my own, including “Absurd place-names” and “The Flemish word ‘kwiestenbiebel’”. More details here.

I’m currently re-reading Nick Davies’s excellent book, “Flat Earth News“, a detailed investigation of distortion, manipulation and in some cases corruption within the media.

One acute issue is the extent to which TV and radio news channels routinely run interviews with people presented as an “analyst” or “consultant” on some issue or another, without any mention of the fact that this person has a direct vested interest. The classic example - and one that I look at in “Don’t Get Fooled Again” - would be the interviewing of a supposedly unbiased scientific expert about the health risks of smoking, without the public being told that he or she takes a regular “retainer” from the tobacco industry.

Since the early days of PR the use of this tactic has grown exponentially, most especially with the build-up to the Iraq war, and its aftermath. One mild example was the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme’s interview a few months back with the mysterious Canon Andrew White, an Anglican clergyman based in Iraq, who gave a rosy account of the situation there and bemoaned what he said was an overly negative view often presented in the media. No mention was made of the fact that the organisation Canon White founded - the  “Foundation for Reconcilation and Relief in the Middle East” (FRRME) - has been heavily funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and various branches of the US government, along with the Orwellian “Iraqi Institute of Peace“, which the FRRME manages.

But this pales into insignificance alongside the exposé from the New York Times - highlighted on the Flat Earth News website - of the lengths the Pentagon has taken to co-opt retired US military officers as unofficial spokesmen for the administration, all the while presenting them as apparently neutral “military analysts” commenting on US policy in Iraq. A further corrupting factor was that many of these former high-ranking army officers had gone on to work for companies bidding for US government contracts for “reconstruction” in Iraq. Retired Lt Col Timur J Eads was one of a number who told the New York Times that they had often held their tongue when interviewed on air, fearing that “some four-star could call up and say ‘Kill that contract’”. Yet rarely, it seems, did the big US TV networks give the public any inkling that these “military analysts” had a clear financial stake in supporting the official US government line.

The former Bush administration official John Bolton narrowly escaped a citizen’s arrest last night at the Hay book festival, when a crack team featuring writer George Monbiot and comedian Marcus Brigstocke tried to apprehend him on war crimes charges. Bolton reportedly fled the festival tent behind a cordon of security guards, with Brigstocke in hot pursuit, as Monbiot was bundled from the scene, and 20 placard-waving protestors denounced Bush’s former arms control under-secretary as a “war criminal”. 

“I’ve made what I believe is the first attempt ever to arrest one of the perpetrators of the Iraq War”, Monbiot later told the BBC. ”I believe that is a precedent and I would like to see that precedent followed up”. 

The Telegraph has published Monbiot’s charge sheet against Bolton here.

This latest development brings to two the number of Comment is Free contributors who have attempted citizen’s arrests on high-profile political figures in recent years…