Liam Scheff Reviews Janine Roberts' "Fear of the Invisible"

These are the predictions of the masters of our universe – the dispensers of existential belief in our historical era of reduction, magnification, and intellectually sterile research, promulgated from on high, by sleep–deprived, grant–minded Graduate students, flocking as sleepwalkers in white lab coats from our grand Universities, marching into the world to save us from all these horrors.

But are they? Is it true – any of it, any of what they predict, or write as history? That is a question we small people are not permitted to ask in polite company, and certainly not in print; and certainly, not on television.

”Are the predictions of the Centers for Disease Control correct? Does the World Health Organization make sense? Is today’s science, true?” A journalist asking these questions, quickly finds him or herself out of the mainstream discussion, as surely as the IRS collects taxes.

And so, Janine Roberts’ new book presents a problem.

The church of old used to have the good sense to ban books like “Fear of the Invisible” the existence of such books undermined their Holy authority and threated insurrection and intellectual revolt, by pointing to the gaping holes and ten thousand improbabilities and logical contusions that exist in the Holy texts (especially when one is asked to read them as literal truth). Banning and burning these folios (and their authors) was simply a necessary business practice, in a cult of belief, such as was the Inquisition Church, Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia.

Or the World Health Organization?

But times have changed. The current church of scientific orthodoxy, which has grown in the footprint of the church of old, does not have to ban books or burn authors in the flesh; we’re more clever and superficially humane in our treatment of today’s Galileos and Brunos.

Today’s heretics are burnt in effigy – in word. They find themselves derided and attacked, without an offer to respond, in the peculiar, small–minded, paradigmatic and highly illiberal Holy texts of our era – the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Nature Medicine, JAMA, and their mouthpieces to the public, The New York Times, PBS, Newsweek, NPR, FOX and CNN.

If this sounds like a misapprehension, or a paranoid fantasy to you, please accept my invitation to read Ms. Roberts remarkable book, even a chapter of it, and watch what happens as your mind expands with charged particles of comprehension, as the blanket of belief that we’ve been told is irrefutable truth, comes into view, and the ten thousand tawdry holes in its canvas give way to the blazing light of epiphany:

”Ah–ha,” you will find yourself saying. “That, finally, makes sense.”

AIDS, Bird Flu, Polio, SARS – these are the promised plagues of our time – but they have been misunderstood and misrepresented so completely and forcibly by our trusted, benevolent, care–taking scientific authorities, that only time will tell if the complex truths that underlie these brand names for poverty, pollution and chemical toxicity, will ever be widely understood. If you wish to get ahead of the curve, I strongly recommend Ms. Roberts book.

Especially pleasing to the curious–minded are the excavations of hidden history – or history that was hidden in plain sight – that she performs for us. Among her archaeological findings is the buried trail of deceit and decrepitude that is the published and venerated work of one poor, unfortunate Robert Gallo, a man who had the mal chance to be an egotistical wretch, pushing intellectually bankrupt but socially seductive work, in the wrong place, at precisely the wrong time in our history.

Or perhaps, the right place and the right time, to push one illiterate catastrophe of a hypothesis, like an 11th Commandment in a secular age, to the forefront of our era. The work Janine does in excavating Dr. Gallo’s truths, from his massive fictions, is alone worth the price of admission.

Will this book be burned? It will be attacked in electronic print, wherever it is reviewed, by those uncourageous few who have turned our redoubtable sciences into a maze of self–limiting, paradigm–bound–and–strangled science fictions; it will be slandered by those unwilling to consider how our intellectual past affects our present; it will be libeled by those who don’t bother to check the limits of their inherited world–view.

But for the rest of us, or those most curious among us, who can manage to give ourselves permission to color outside the lines, a book like this gives a rare and wonderful opportunity – it’s a chance to take a journey beyond the dark canvas of today’s dogmas, and peer into tomorrow’s wider, more humane, more correct understanding of the rather grand world we are so very fortunate to live in.