The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse
Back in 1980 novelist WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS addressed the Eco-Technic Institute.
A transcript of his 'prophetic'(?) talk.
This article appeared in
New Dawn Magazine No. 37, July-August 1996
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.html
By William S. Burroughs
I’m speaking here as a writer of fiction, and of course many of the hypotheses and theories and ideas and suggestions that I will put forward may horrify a scientific audience. But they’re to be seen from a fictional point of view. My subject is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which were Famine, Plague, War, and Death...
Portentous and purposeful as the priest advancing on a dying man to administer the Last Rites, so the four caballeros by their solid presence indicate that Time has been called for that particular biologic or sociological experiment. Closing time, gentlemen... dinosaurs bellow piteously, Famine saddles up his cayuse and gallops through swamplands leaving a dustbowl behind him... and the outmoded dinosaurs subside into museum skeletons, gaped at by human spectators. And the day of the spectators will come too.
At the present time, the situation of course with regards to the Four Horsemen is much more complicated than it was before man appeared on the scene, there the most important Horseman was probably Famine. At the present time, the subject of the experiment, in this case the human species, can to some extent control the conditions of the experiment, but this isn’t such an advantage as one would think since they cannot control themselves. The human creature has demonstrated through the centuries a stubborn disinclination to control himself. However, if I may indulge in whimsy, had we been dinosaurs we might have built great dams to preserve supplies of water and protect our way of life and we might have hunted down the despicable mammals as the egg-sucking rats they were. Some have advanced theories that the mammals ate the dinosaurs’ eggs and undermined them that way though many other factors were at work in the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
There is such basic disagreement as to how existing conditions can be altered, by exactly who and for the benefit of whom, there doesn’t appear to be any sort of agreement. And stupidity and short-sighted self interest may well swamp Spacecraft Earth before the Horsemen can saddle up. Meanwhile, the Spectral Riders are being eagerly wooed by the CIA and similar agencies in other countries... wise, far-sighted men who will no doubt use their awesome knowledge of Famine, Plague, War and Death for the good of all mankind.
“Put that joker Death on the line. Take care of Mao and that gang of cut-throats.”
Actually, Western society is so constructed as to concentrate the greatest power in the worst possible hands. See, practically anything has military applications. So really the most important knowledge is now Top Secret classified.
Famine, seemingly the most fortuitous of the quartet, is transcending the caprices of weather, deforestation and overpopulation and getting a new look. We can in fact extend the area of Famine to include the lack of any substance or condition essential to the support of life. We can in fact create needs quite as overwhelming or compulsive as the need for food and water. Drug addiction is of course an example of a biologic need artificially produced by the administration of drugs. And no doubt drugs much more habit-forming than heroin could be produced in the laboratory by jiggering and tinkering with the habit-forming molecules.
We now have substances which could be introduced into the water supply, or even in gaseous form into the enemy air, that have no effect unless it is withdrawn. And then a battery of crippling symptoms would develop, reducing the enemy to complete impotence. There are certain metabolic illnesses in which the subject is unable to absorb certain essential vitamins and minerals no matter how much he ingests. In fact, it is not far-fetched to conceive of inducing metabolic changes that would make the absorption of any nutriments impossible: no matter how much he eats the person would die of starvation.
The alliance between War and Plague was cemented with the first germ experiments and in this area there have been a number of interesting developments. Despite a lot of talk about discontinuing such experiments and closing down the The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse By William S. Burroughs Page 1 of 4
biologic and chemical warfare centres, Fort Dietrich, in Maryland is now dedicated to cancer research. And cancer research, incidentally, overlaps the more sophisticated areas of biologic weaponry.
As early as World War II, England had a Doomsday Bug which was a mutated virus produced by exposing such viruses as hepatitis and rabies to radiation. Now we know that a number of experiments have been carried out on exposing fruit flies to radiation. These experiments conclusively showed that there were no favorable mutations resulting from exposure to radiation... certainly not on fruit flies. Now one wonders why they didn’t carry these experiments further and expose microscopic and sub-microscopic life to radiation. The answer is, undoubtedly they did and are doing just that but it’s Top Secret. It is difficult to believe that such a promising line of research was abandoned and disturbing to speculate where that research is at the present time...
And there is an item from the London Times, 18th April, 1971:
“New Cancer Virus Made By Accident... A completely new virus, probably capable of producing cancer in humans, has been made by accident in an American laboratory... Fears expressed by cautious scientists that such medical research could inadvertently produce new human diseases instead of curing existing ones. The new agent was discovered by Dr.
Abramson of the National Cancer Institute, near Washington. Under special conditions, the mouse virus could be persuaded to infect human cancer cells in a test tube, though the process was extremely inefficient. Dr. Abramson now reports, in Nature, that the mouse virus has changed its nature. It has become highly infective to human cells and completely non-infective to mouse cells.”
In other words, we have a permanent change. A major genetic change has occurred in the virus and what amounts to a completely new virus has emerged. The virus has picked up a human gene and incorporated it, giving it the ability to multiply readily in human cells. Sir Macfarlane Burnet, in The Lancet, sounds a word of warning, of the “almost unimaginable catastrophe of a virgin soil epidemic involving all the populous regions of the world”. The age-old dream of a selective pestilence is now within the reach of modern technology.
This is also from the London Times, about 1970:
“Ethnic weapons that wipe out one race and leave another unharmed could soon be developed, according to leading geneticist. Carl Larsen (a Norwegian) said recently: ‘Ethnic weapons would employ differences in human genetic configurations to make genetic variations which would make genocide a particularly attractive form of war.’ (I’m quoting, this is not my opinion.) Writing in the U.S. Army Military Review, Larsen argues that enzyme levels can vary according to race; the absence of certain enzymes can cause death. Enzyme deficiency could be exploited by chemical warfare.”
It would probably be possible to develop a chemical which will act as an enzyme inhibitor. Say you find an enzyme inhibitor to which 90% of Europeans would be vulnerable, which affects only 10% of Africans. Since the inhibitor could tell friend from foe, no matter how intermingled, it is the superselective military weapon. It is what all military thinkers dream of. Larsen admitted that “more genetic research was needed before ethnic weapons became a practical reality,” but again this was ten years ago.