Did the Deep State, using Robert Maxwell, start the censorship of science? By Gloria Moss and Niall McCrae.
Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gatekeeper is the peer review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature. …
In reality peer review has become a means of knowledge control — and as we argue here, perhaps that was always the purpose.
Maxwell’s company established peer review:
You may be surprised to know that the instigator of peer review was media tycoon Robert Maxwell. In 1951, at the age of 28, the Czech emigré purchased three-quarters of Butterworth Press for about half a million pounds at current value.
He renamed it Pergamon Press, with its core business in science, technology and medicine (STM) journals, all of which installed the peer review system. According to Myer Kutz (2019), ‘Maxwell, justifiably, was one of the key figures — if not the key figure — in the rise of the commercial STM journal publishing business in the years after World War II.’
Maxwell’s company stole a march on other publishers and its influence was huge. By 1959 Pergamon was publishing 40 journals, surging to 150 by 1965. By 1996, one million peer reviewed articles had been published. …
Maxwell was instrumental to peer review becoming a regime to reinforce prevailing doctrines and power. …
British intelligence bankrolled him:
But how was he able to acquire Butterworth Press initially? In 1940, Maxwell was a penniless 16-year-old of Jewish background, having left Czechoslovakia for refuge in Britain. His linguistic talents attracted the British intelligence services. On an assignment in Paris in 1944 he met his Huguenot wife Elisabeth. After the war ended in 1945 he spent two years in occupied Germany with the Foreign Office as head of the press section.
[In 1949] with no lucrative activity to his name, this young man found the money to buy an established British publishing house. According to Craig Whitney (New York Times, 1991), Maxwell made Pergamon a thriving business with ‘a bank loan and money borrowed from his wife’s family and from relatives in America’. …
While operating as a KGB agent in Berlin, he presented himself to MI6 as having ‘established connections with leading scientists all over the world’. According to investigative journalist Tom Bower, ‘unbelievably what he really wanted was for MI6 to finance him to start a publishing company’. This point is corroborated by Desmond Bristow, former MI6 officer, who states that Maxwell asked the secret security service to finance his venture.
And why would the deep state do that?
If it was the intelligence services (British and/or Russian) that bankrolled Pergamon Press, their motive could have been to ensure control of knowledge following the tremendous advances of the Second World War (such as nuclear physics and weapons of mass destruction).
Maxwell’s choice of name for the publisher is interesting. The ancient site of Pergamon was allegedly the locus of Satan’s throne (Revelation, 2:12), and a cynic might suggest that Maxwell’s peer review system would turn science from Enlightenment to a new Dark Age.
A ploy of Maxwell was to label his journals as global: instead of the parochial ‘British Journal of . . .’ it was always ‘International Journal of . . .’
Job well done:
In 1991 Maxwell sold his academic publishing empire to the Dutch publisher Elsevier for £440million. By then he had achieved his — and perhaps his secret sponsors’ — goal of a globally controlled academic press.
The carbon dioxide theory of global warming is mostly bollocks, but no real criticism of it is allowed in the scientific literature — yet. Meanwhile, fortunes are made and political power is rearranged with the aid of that theory.