While the WHO is getting ready for having its powers vastly increased by a Pandemic Treaty and a reform of the International Health Regulations (IHR), the organization is celebrating its 75. anniversary. What is surprisingly absent from most eulogies of 75 years of WHO is the name of Brock Chisholm. The Canadian was head of the interim commission that created the WHO, and he became its first director-general. Before that, he had been chief medical officer of the Canadian army and briefly secretary of state for health.
The fact that he is so rarely mentioned, even in the great anniversary year of his organization, might have to do with the fact that Chisholm was a bit too outspoken and forthcoming about his goals.
His views and intentions had limited support, to put it mildly, among the common people. Long before Chisholm was was elected head of the commission to found the WHO, he argued publicly that it was necessary to remove family tradition and close family ties, loyalty to the homeland, and religious dogma from the minds of the people in order to be able to establish a rational world government.
The books and speeches of the psychiatrist and follower of Freudian psychoanalysis are hard to come by. I base the following on John Farley’s friendly portrait in his 2008 book “Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War,” read on the Internet via Google Books. And on Chisholm’s 1957 book “Prescription for Survival”, which I was able to obtain. The latter shows that his views and intentions had not changed significantly until after the end of his work at and on the WHO.
In October 1945, Chisholm was invited to deliver the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures in Washington to a distinguished audience, According to Farley, he addressed the question of how to avert the threat to humanity of further wars. Chisholm diagnosed morality, the concept of right and wrong, as the cause of wars:
„The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong.“
The human race must be freed, he said, from “the crippling burden of good and evil”. Instead, the education of our children must “substitute intelligent and rational thinking for the certainties of the old people“, because „freedom from moralities means freedom to observe, to think and behave sensibly.”
In his view, mankind had only 15 to 20 years to make the transition to a completely new kind of education before another war would break out.
He was sharply criticized in Canada and the US for these statements, which he also expressed on other occasions, because unlike him most people considered the family, school and church to be places where children are ideally educated to become responsible human beings.
But these convictions did not stand in the way of his election as the first WHO Director-General; on the contrary, as they went together with ardent advocacy of world citizenship and a world government.
His world view was ultra-materialistic and faithful to science. Though, he accepted as science only the mechanistic clear-cut cause-effect relations of physics, as they seemed to be valid until the end of the 1920-ies, until Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and others established quantum mechanics and its fundamental uncertainties. The same outdated mechanistic worldview, Chisholm applied to human thought and feeling.
He found myths and tales that stimulated the imagination and conveyed the morals and wisdom of past generations to be highly dangerous:
„Any man who tells his son that the sun goes to be at night is contributing directly to the next war … Any child who believes in Santa Claus has had his ability to think permanently destroyed … He will become a man who has ulcers at 40, develops a sore back when there is a tough job to do, and refuses to think realistically when war threatens.”
It was through such controversial speeches that he achieved a certain notoriety. Regardless, Chisholm was appointed executive secretary of the Interim Commission that would establish the WHO.
In his speeches in this capacity, Chisholm called for replacing national citizenship with world citizenship and continued to condemn culturally colored myths and fairy tales because they prevented clear thinking in cause and effect and thereby caused wars and the world’s suffering, since rational people without irrational loyalties would not wage wars and would be committed to the welfare of all humanity.
Shortly before the could go live after he accession of the 26th country, he connected his theory with the work of the future WHO. He wrote that health was now understood not only as a healthy body and a healthy mind, but also ” the ability to live in harmony with other people of other minds, with other traditions, with other religions, and with other social systems, throughout the world.“
The exact definition of health in the preamble to the constitution of the WHO reads:
„Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.“
He wrote that with the WHO’s definition of health now firmly in place, “unreasoning devotions and loyalties” would be considered signs of mental or social health impairment. In 1947 – that is, before he was elected Director-General of the WHO – Chisholm proclaimed:
“There is an increasing appreciation, that it is necessary for all of us to become world citizens and to sacrifice much of our own national sovereignities.“
Despite, or because of, the many speeches and publications in which Chisholm had set forth his highly controversial world view and goals, he was elected in camera by the World Health Assembly on July 21, 1948, by 46 votes to 2, to become the first Director-General of WHO. He was preferred to candidates who had considerably more experience in health policy.
Chisholm in 1957
According to John Farley, Chisholm, in selecting WHO staff, attached great importance to making sure that the successful candidates saw themselves as world citizens and had no irrational attachments to any religion or to the culture and nation of their origin.
In his 1957 “Prescription” for Survival, he proudly tells of a WHO Secretariat staff member who returned from home leaves very unhappy because he found it painful to see the petty concerns and needs that preoccupied his relatives while he was busy saving the world:
“Their attitudes and their views were no longer his. He had become a functioning citizen of the world.”
These were the people with whom Chisholm populated the staff of the WHO, of which he was not just a little proud.
At the very end of his book, after one has long wondered about his outlandish-seeming views and conclusions, Chisholm describes the extravagant perspective which explains his contempt for people’s cultural, familial and national roots.
He invites us to take the “rational” standpoint of a visitor from outer space who prefers no culture, no religion, no nation to any other, but who considers rational only what serves the well-being of the human family as a whole.
Chisholm never dwelt on the question of who defines this well being. In his speeches and writings, it is presupposed that what serves the well-being of humanity is obvious to the wise citizen of the world.
National borders are hard to understand for these objective observers from the universe and he explanations for their existence seem illogical to them. And because the reasons for nations, religions and different cultures are apparently all unreasonable, they would conclude that loyalties implanted already in children are the problem, – a very big and dangerous problem.
Probably the outside observers would conclude that humanity is best exterminated for such reasons, Chisholm conjectures, but he hopes that people can still learn in time to renounce all their loyalties to groups and profess sole membership in the great human family. His concluding paragraph reads:
„No one can think about the future of mankind without recognizing that some kind of world organization, some kind of world government or confederation is both inevitable and desirable.“
It is in this light that the WHO’s definition of health, which has guided its actions for 75 years, should be read, a definition of which Chisholm is very proud. He explains:
“The health of a human being must take in his ability to function wholly in all circumstances – physical, mental and social. The truly healthy human being can use (..) his social equipment in a way that makes him a valuable member of the human race.“
For his book, as well as implicitly for the WHO, he states that this definition of health allows to deal with very, wide range of topics under the rubric of health. And this very broad definition, he says, is very firmly anchored in the WHO constitution and can only be changed by a three-quarters majority of the membership.
Chisholm’s use of language with expressions like “functioning,” and “valuable member of the human race” coming up often, sounds alarmingly like that of an engineer who has to worry about making a machine work and improve it. This use of language and this extremely technocratic attitude run through his entire book. It becomes clear that he conceives of the ideal world as a well-functioning social mega-machine in which every human machine part functions without interference or conflict.
Functioning well means: not being affected by all the unreasonable cultural, familial, country, religious, or other spiritual influences and loyalties that distract from the task of being a well-functioning machine part.
Without conflict means without loyalties and ideological or spiritual beliefs, except that of being a functioning member of the human race.
Thus Chisholm laments that our educational and moral authorities have embedded in us limited and limiting loyalties that “prevent us from functioning as members of the human race.”
Chisholm justifies his long tirades against telling children stories, myths, and fairy tales with the argument:
„The human race cannot afford to have good material spoiled, good material which might contribute to its eventual security.“
Conclusions
It should have become clear that the anti-democratic-global-technocratic views and goals of the first Director-General of the WHO were not an insignificant aberration. Those who put him in office knew full well. The WHO Constitution reflected his views, at least in his view. And it was he who selected WHO staff on the basis that they thought the same as he did, that they felt they were citizens of the world in his sense. An organizational culture created in this way often develops strong persistence.
Looking to the present and the future, as envisioned by WHO and its supporters, one can hardly help but notice continuities. For example, in the International Health Regulations, WHO’s jurisdiction is to be greatly expanded from “risk to public health” to “all risks that may affect public health.”
This would mean, among other things, that WHO could use its greatly expanded powers for anything that purports to help avert a climate emergency, which would pose a potential risk to health. It could also easily declare itself responsible for education, thanks to its broad definition of health.
The WHO is already working with increasing vigor on the goal of educating a new human being. It controls and manipulates social media worldwide in NSA fashion and has had a resolution passed that obliges the WHO and member governments to systematically use the behavioral sciences to change people’s attitudes worldwide.
Chisholm’s anti-democratic-technocratic worldview can be found in strong expression among the WHO’s funders with great influence, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as among its close cooperation partners such as the World Economic Forum.
The goal of uprooting people culturally and spiritually, of depriving them of a sense of belonging to a group, has come very close to fulfillment, at least in North America and Europe. Patriotism has long ceased to be a positive word in Germany, where I live, for historical reasons. But increasingly, not only in Germany, the nation, and everything connected with it, is equated with nationalism and devalued or condemned. Ties to one’s family and homeland are considered provincial and regressive, and right-wing, which in turn is increasingly equated with right-wing radicalism. The same applies to all spiritual thinking and feeling and everything that cannot be explained by orthodox medicine and the mechanistic physics of 100 years ago.
Instead, a “welcome culture” and a migration pact are intended to promote multiculturalism, in which people from all over the world live side by side without national loyalties or allegiances to groups other than humanity as a whole.
Unions have been gutted. A labor movement no longer exists. Demonstrating together for peace, civil liberties or social justice is considered radical right-wing. Not even being a man or a woman is considered a legitimate group affiliation anymore. Those who insist that it is must expect to be attacked as right-wing extremists.
The uncontrolled powers, which are to fall to the WHO Director-General as an individual or to the WHO Board of Directors (see attachment), still breathe recognizably the global-technocratic spirit of Chisholm and his comrades-in-arms from the early days of the WHO. According to this worldview, it is so obvious for a true and rational world citizen at the levers of the desired world government what has to be done in the interest of mankind that he can and should be given the greatest possible powers without controls.
It is worth asking the question: if the dissolution of all group affiliations has progressed and been advanced iso much since the first WHO Director-General advocated this so vigorously, does this perhaps serve the goals Chisholm described? Does it serve to turn people into smoothly functioning cogs in a social mega-machine controlled by global technocrats?
Appendix
Summary of the proposed WHO pandemic treaty and the proposed amendment to the International Health Regulations.
From my post of 12/5/2023 (in German): As far as the WHO pandemic treaty is concerned, there has been a “conceptual zero draft” since the end of November 2022 . The pharmaceutical companies themselves could hardly have formulated it better in their favor. It commits the signatory states to:
- Strengthen the WHO’s central role as a guiding and coordinating authority,
- Facilitate WHO’s rapid access to outbreak areas, including by sending teams of experts to assess and support the response to emerging outbreaks
- Enhancing capacity to build and maintain strategic stocks of pandemic response products,
- Provide stockpiles, raw materials, and other necessary inputs for sustainable production of pandemic products (especially active pharmaceutical ingredients), including for stockpiling,
- Incentives (money) for pharmaceutical companies related to everything possible around the development, production, production capacity, distribution and stockpiling of their products,
- Collaboration with the private sector (pharmaceutical companies) and civil society (Gates Foundation) in all possible ways.
- Manage “infodemias” through appropriate channels, including social media, counter misinformation and disinformation,
More concrete and drastic would be the reform of the IHR according to the submitted proposals. The IHR are binding. These reform proposals include:
- Removal of the attribute “non-binding” from WHO recommendations,
- mandatory reviews of compliance with recommendations by the WHO Emergency Committee,
- Governments to ensure compliance with WHO recommendations by non-state actors,
- Scope of IHR to be expanded to include “all risks that may affect public health.”
- commitment to respect for human dignity and freedom to be deleted,
- the possibility should be opened for health documents to contain information on laboratory tests, in general, not only during health emergencies,
- The WHO Director-General can declare regional or global health emergencies on his own authority and without the consent of affected governments,
- He can then make recommendations and is given leverage to enforce them,
- He is given leverage to send teams of experts to affected countries to help enforce their recommendations.
