Cannonfire had a thought-provoking post up yesterday: Cancer conspiracy speculation: It goes way beyond Hugo Chavez. We'll never know for sure how much that is now pure speculation was indeed fact, skillfully hidden. It would be amazing if all the named South American leaders afflicted by cancer were in fact murdered: assassinated in slow motion. A list:
Lula - Former President of Brazil; Dilma - Current president of Brazil; Cristina Kirchner - Argentina's current president; Nestor Kirchner - Former president of Argentina; Hugo Chavez - Venezuela's President; Evo Morales - Bolivian socialist leader; Fernando Lugo - the Paraguayan President; Ollanta Humala - President of Peru.
"If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation." (William Hazlitt).Assassination is usually envisaged as carried out via gun shot(s), but that method has obvious drawbacks. Its immediacy makes it more than likely that the shooter will be identified and apprehended. There's always the chance that the shot(s) will miss target, but still result in capture of the gunman. Technological progress must surely, by now, have afforded would-be assassins more sophisticated and insidious ways of attaining their objective. It's not at all in the realm of sci-fi or dystopia that a direct method of inducing cancer in a targeted individual has been developed. It'd be nigh on impossible to track down the guilty party, or to pinpoint the cause, especially in the case of an otherwise healthy and vibrant non-smoker.
Thinking on this brought to mind a non-shooting assassination case in London, in 1978. The assassinated was Georgi Markov a Bulgarian dissident writer. (From Wikipedia)
Markov originally worked as a novelist and playwright in his native country, then governed by a communist regime under Chairman Todor Zhivkov, until his defection from Bulgaria in 1969. After relocating to the West, he worked as a broadcaster and journalist for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe, and Germany's Deutsche Welle. Markov used such forums to conduct a campaign of sarcastic criticism against the incumbent Bulgarian regime. As a result of this, it has been speculated that the Bulgarian government may have decided to silence him, and may have asked the KGB for help. He died as a result of an incident on a London street when a micro-engineered pellet containing ricin was fired into his leg via an umbrella wielded by someone associated with the Bulgarian secret police.(Photograph: Fernando Llano/AP)
