A global nuclear phaseout or renaissance?

Germany's nuclear phaseout will be completed by the end of 2022. Safe final repositories for nuclear waste still haven't been found, but some countries are still building new reactors. 

Does nuclear power have a future?

China'a new nuclear power plant Hualong One
China is the world leader in the construction of new nuclear power plants, such as here in Fujian Province

There are currently 413 nuclear reactors in operation in 32 countries around the globe. According to the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR), nuclear power accounted for about 10% of global electricity demand in 2019, the highest share being 17.5% in 1996.

Most reactors were built between 1968 and 1986, mainly in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union and Japan. The global average age of these reactors is 31 years.



Infographic showing nuclear reactors in selected countries
Europe, the US and China dominate the world in terms of numbers of reactors

US: Future of nuclear power uncertain

The US currently has 94 nuclear reactors — more than any other country in the world. In 2019, they met 20% of the country's electricity demand. The US also has the oldest reactors in the world, with an average age of 40 years.

Most reactors went into operation by 1985; only one started up within the last 20 years. Construction of two new reactors began in 2013. These are expected to begin working in the next few years.

The future of nuclear power in the US is uncertain. Although there are concepts for a new generation of reactors, it is questionable whether they can one day generate electricity as cheaply as the renewable energy sector.

There is no final repository for highly radioactive waste in the US. It is stored on-site at the power plants.

Russia wants to export nuclear power

Russia currently operates 38 nuclear reactors. In 2019, they covered about 20% of electricity demand. Ten new reactors have come online over the past decade. Two nuclear power plants have been under construction and are expected to start up in the next few years. The average age of Russian reactors is 28 years.

As Russia no longer wants to subsidize the construction of nuclear power plants in its own country, new domestic construction projects are uncertain. Instead, the state corporation Rosatom wants to focus on building reactors abroad in the future. According to WNISR, 10 Russian reactors are currently under construction abroad, two each in Bangladesh, India, Turkey and Slovakia, and one each in Iran and Belarus.

Russia does not have a final storage facility for its highly radioactive nuclear waste. Critics have complained about the lack of transparency in the handling of nuclear waste.

Infographic comparing energy costs of different energy sources
Nuclear remains an expensive energy option

Nuclear power too expensive in India

India currently has 21 nuclear reactors. In 2019, the share of nuclear power in the grid was 3%. Three reactors went online over the last 10 years, and six power plants are under construction. The average age of reactors is 23 years.

However, the expansion of nuclear power in India has been plagued by delays and mounting costs.

In 2012, the Planning Commission of India projected that the total capacity of all reactors would increase from just under 5 gigawatts (GW) to as much as 30 GW by 2027.

Today, reactors with a capacity of less than 7 GW are connected to the grid. The reactors under construction have a total capacity of 4 GW. Since the construction time of reactors in India is more than 10 years, a maximum of 11 GW will be on the grid in 2027, almost three times less than originally planned

India does not have a final storage facility for highly radioactive nuclear waste.

Watch video 00:58 German Constitutional Court rules in Vattenfall nuclear phaseout case

China: More renewables instead of nuclear power

China is the world leader in the construction of new nuclear power plants. In the last 10 years, 37 reactors have come online. According to WNISR, 49 reactors were generating electricity at the beginning of 2021 and 17 more reactors are under construction. The share of nuclear power in the country's electricity mix was 5% in 2019.

But China also built significantly fewer reactors than originally planned in the country's five-year plan. At the same time, the expansion of renewable energies is eclipsing nuclear.

According to the National Energy Administration, 72 GW of wind power, 48 GW of photovoltaics and 13 GW of hydropower were connected to the grid in 2020. Nuclear power plants contributed only 2 GW of new capacity in the same year.

China does not have a repository for highly radioactive waste, but it is exploring one in the Gobi Desert. Its nuclear waste is currently stored at various reactor sites.


View of the construction site of the nuclear reactor in Flamanville, France
​​​​The nuclear reactor in Flamanville, France, was supposed to be ready by 2012

France: Nuclear industry with huge losses

France has relied on nuclear power like no other country in the world in recent decades. In 2019, almost 71% of electricity demand was covered by nuclear power. Currently, 56 power plants are still in operation and one is under construction. The power plants have an average age of 36 years, and the last reactor went online in 1999.

The world's largest nuclear energy supplier and state-owned group EDF, which operates the French reactors, is indebted to the tune of €42 billion ($50.3 billion) and will have to invest an estimated €100 billion by 2030 to keep the old reactors in operation.

It is still unclear whether new reactors for nuclear power will be built in France. The decision has been postponed and is to be taken by the new French government after the next election in 2022.

There is no final repository for highly radioactive waste in France.

Poland: No investor for nuclear power

Poland has been planning to go nuclear since 1980 and started building two reactors, but stopped construction after the Chernobyl reactor disaster of 1986.

After that, there were repeated and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to restart construction. In 2014, the government adopted a plan to build six new reactors, with the first unit coming online in 2024. However, little has happened since then because it remains unclear how this costly program is to be financed.

This article has been adapted from German by Neil King.

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A global nuclear phaseout or renaissance? | Environment| All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 04.02.2021

Opinion: QAnon, conspiracy theories are no joke

More and more people seem ready to believe theories that not so long ago would have been dismissed as sheer nonsense. This isn't just a strange, laughable phenomenon — it's dangerous for democracy, says Martin Muno.


The storming of the US Capitol in January was partly fueled by QAnon conspiracy theories

If, just a few years ago, someone had stated in public that a global elite was kidnapping children and torturing them to harvest their blood to make an elixir of youth, they would have been directed to the nearest psychiatric ward. Yet according to a British poll, some 10% of US citizens say they believe in at least some elements of this absurd theory known as QAnon.

The conspiracy theory has also been doing the rounds in Germany and, according to the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which sets out to combat far-right ideologies and racism, it has already attracted some 150,000 supporters. This makes the German QAnon community the largest outside of the English-speaking realm.

A Konrad Adenauer Foundation study conducted from October 2019 to February 2020 found that around a third of Germans were open to conspiracy theories. Not counting children under 14, that's 24 million people. Other polls support this figure, and have found many links between QAnon supporters, COVID-19 deniers and right-wing extremists.
At the click of a mouse

How can such blatant nonsense resonate in an enlightened world? After all, this is the 21st century, not the Middle Ages. The answer is: It's just all a mouse click away. Social networks are the perfect breeding ground for fake news and conspiracy theories.

How dangerous are conspiracy theories?

A study conducted in Germany by Correctiv, which describes itself as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, concluded that Facebook and YouTube were the platforms on which the most false information was spread, with messaging services such as Telegram and WhatsApp not far behind. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that it took six times longer to reach 1,500 people with real news than with fake news.
Wake-up call for social media platforms

Social media platforms are in a predicament. On the one hand, they have tended to defend a very broad concept of free speech and tolerate content that amounts to fake news, profanity and insults. It was only in October 2020 that Facebook agreed to take down "content that denies or distorts the Holocaust." Holocaust denial has long been considered a crime in many countries.

On the other hand, these platforms are beginning to admit that the rapid spread of fake news and hatred facilitated by their platforms poses a danger — as shown by the storming of the US Capitol last month.

In response to this wake-up call, some platforms are beginning to hold users to account and have blocked the accounts of prominent and less prominent people. Some also now flag fake news with a warning.

Hold social platforms to account

But this isn't enough. Facebook and the rest must also be made liable for content such as fake news and hate speech posted on their platforms. The European Commission has tried to address this with its Digital Services Act but faces the difficulty of navigating the thin line between curbing the spread of fake news and censorship.

Not only that — media competence must also be taught more in schools. Young people are more likely to gain their information from social media than traditional news outlets, which need to develop formats better suited to reaching the "YouTube generation."

These are urgent, crucial changes. Conspiracy theories must be resisted because they harbor the potential to destroy democracies, as witnessed not so long ago in Washington.

Last week, in her speech to the German Bundestag on International Holocaust Day, the activist and politician Marina Weisband made it clear: "Being Jewish in Germany means understanding that [the Holocaust] did happen, and that it could happen again. It means that anti-Semitism doesn't start when somebody shoots at a synagogue. That the Shoah did not begin with the gas chambers. It starts with conspiracy narratives."

This article has been adapted from German

The truth about Russia's role in pushing the QAnon canon of conspiracies

Lindsay Beyerstein, Alternet
February 02, 2021

Trump supporters cheer on election night 2016
. (Image via Mandel Ngan/AFP.)

The cult of QAnon is at a crossroads. Adherents of the conspiracy theory/new religious movement convinced themselves that Donald Trump was poised to purge the cannibal pedophile cabal and its traitorous enablers in a cleansing burst of political violence. But with Joe Biden in the White House, and Capitol rioters facing charges for their insurrection of January 6, prophecy has apparently failed. QAnon has been banished from major social media platforms. You can't even sell Q merch on Etsy anymore. True believers are struggling to make sense of it all. Q himself has fallen silent. It has been over a month since his last dispatch to the faithful.

In just three years, QAnon has exploded from an anonymous post on 4chan to a household word. The FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorist threat and the QAnon ideology has been the impetus for numerous terrorist attacks, not even counting the major role played by QAnon adherents in the assault on the US Capitol. QAnon has fractured families and destroyed lives. Astonishingly, we still don't know who Q is.

The enduring mystery of Q's identity has led to speculation about QAnon being an influence operation, (aka a psyop). Which raises the question of who's supposedly running this operation. QAnon's critics typically blame Russia or an alliance of Russia and Trump's inner circle. Disillusioned former QAnon sympathizers including Trump advisor Steve Bannon have also embraced a version of the psyop theory, claiming that QAnon was a deep state hoax designed to fool patriots.

Whatever role Russia may have played in promoting this conspiracy theory, the real problem is that there's a huge market in the United States for conspiracy theories that promise the violent overthrow of democracy.

Influence operations are typically military- or intelligence-led efforts to shape how a population thinks or feels without resorting to physical force.

Russian intelligence operates within the vast QAnon ecosystem but QAnon is a home-grown phenomenon, deeply rooted in American prejudices and preoccupations. QAnon and its forerunner Pizzagate were forged on 4Chan, a crucible of both the Alt-Right and American conspiracy culture. Understanding the racist, ultranationalist, conspiratorial culture of /pol is key to understanding the likely origins of QAnon. It's also important to understand how contemporary conspiracy theorizing incorporates and elaborates on older conspiratorial themes.

Q is old conspiracies made new

Many of the central tenets of QAnon are retreads of the antisemitic hoax tract, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which purports to be the minutes of a criminal conspiracy of rabbis to take over the world. The Protocols, in turn, recycles the ancient antisemitic superstition known as blood libel, the notion that Jews are harvesting the blood of Christian children.

Q asserts that the Houses of Rothschild and Soros are "puppet masters" covertly manipulating historical events. (Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene notoriously speculated that a space laser from "Rothschild, Inc" might have caused the Camp fire in California. Video of Greene berating a Parkland shooting survivor as a pawn of George Soros resurfaced recently.) Many of the QAnon faithful have their own take on blood libel, with the cannibal pedophiles being said to harvest a molecule known as adrenochrome from the blood of their child victims.

Ironically, the Protocols were commissioned by the head of the Russian secret police in the late 19th or early 20th century. The goal was to set back the cause of liberalism by convincing Czar Nicholas the II that the rise of capitalism in Russia was a conspiracy by Jews and the Freemasons. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was created by Russian conservatives to fool their own ruler, but the impact of the document was much broader. The forgery became the Ur-text of global conspiracy culture. Henry Ford's newspaper published the Protocols in 1920. The Nazis cited the Protocols to justify the Holocaust. The influence of the Protocols can even be seen in Dan Brown's bestselling Da Vinci Code novels.

In 2017, Vladimir Putin's personal confessor was hyping the idea that Czar Nicholas and his family were ritually murdered by Jews. (In fact, the deposed Nicholas and his family were assassinated by Bolsheviks shortly after the Revolution of 1917. The leader of the death squad was commended by Lenin for his work.)

QAnon sprang from the primordial soup of 4chan's Politically Incorrect board, aka /pol. 4chan is an anonymous imageboard where anyone can post almost anything. 4chan is often described as the birthplace of the Alt Right. Users are known as "anons."

"Q" is short for "Q Clearance Patriot." Q purports to be a high-ranking US intelligence official leaking details of Donald Trump's campaign against his enemies in the deep state. Q's revelations began in late October of 2017. The researcher who posts as Q Origins on Twitter has published his findings on the investigative news site Bellingcat.

Some have speculated that various pro-Russian themes in Q's body of work are evidence that the QAnon phenomenon was a Russian influence operation, but this argument ignores the fact that Vladimir Putin's Russia is organically popular in the Alt Right and /pol. Q and his message board disciples may admire Putin's brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism without being Russian agents.

In order to understand the origins of QAnon, it is necessary to understand the imageboard tradition of LARPing. "In the 4Chan context, a LARP is when you pose as a big insider," explains the anonymous author of the Q Origins Project.

Q isn't a psyops


There's a long history of imageboard anons pretending to be high-ranking national security officials who, for inexplicable reasons, have decided to divulge highly classified information to one of the web's most notorious cesspools. In imageboard culture, LARPing is like spinning ghost stories around the digital campfire. Most people know it's fake, but it's fun to pretend that it might be real. Before Q, posters with names like FBIAnon and MegaAnon acquired followings as LARPers, often exploring themes that would later be featured in Q drops. LARPers will often entertain their followers with puzzles and cryptic predictions--a style that is familiar to anyone who has read Q drops. Followers become invested in decoding the riddles. A LARPer may gain respect if their predictions seem to come true.

The anonymous researcher behind the Q Origins project has painstakingly reconstructed the pre-history of QAnon. He notes that, like other LARPers before him, Q constructs his pronouncements out of conspiracy theories that are already popular on /pol.

"They love them a conspiracy theory and Q built on that. He stitches together the various LARPs and just creates this Frankenstein that very quickly explodes off of /pol."

The first major proselytizers for Q were two /pol moderators and a YouTuber named Tracy Diaz. Within weeks, they started spreading Q content to YouTube and other social media platforms.

There is evidence that trolls from the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency helped to disseminate the forerunner conspiracy to QAnon, Pizzagate. The breakout Q drop of 2017 continues the Pizzagate narrative of the year before. We're told that Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested.

If Pizzagate is the Old Testament, QAnon is the New Testament. Pizzagate diagnosed the cannibal pedophile problem and Q framed Donald Trump as the solution. Q is the prophet, the self-proclaimed intelligence insider who reveals the "truths" the OPs of /pol expected to hear: Donald Trump is the messiah who is going to usher in a golden age through a spasm of apocalyptic violence.

Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. One of their prizes was a trove of personal emails by Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta.

The basic tenets of the Pizzagate conspiracy gelled on 4Chan's /pol board on or about November 3, 2016, as users combed through Podesta's hacked emails. They fixated on banal emails chronicling Podesta's social life, which included references to DC restaurants like Comet Ping Pong as well as to home cooking. The anons decided that words like "cheese pizza" were actually code for "child porn." This collective world-building exercise eventually decreed that Podesta and Clinton were part of a network of pedophiles enslaving children in the (non-existent) basement of Comet Ping Pong.

The Trump campaign, like the Republican community at large, were enthusiastic consumers and distributors of lurid anti-Clinton conspiracies. Trump campaign luminaries like Gen. Michael Flynn and right-wing media outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars furiously amplified Pizzagate content. This content was discussed by anons on 4chan's /pol, reworked and elaborated into their conspiratorial worldview, including the next round of LARPs.


We know that accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, the notorious Kremlin-linked troll farm, hyped Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian state-controlled media like Sputnik and RT have also given sympathetic coverage to these narratives, in keeping with Russia's well-known strategy of amplifying existing rifts within the United States. Russian disinformation takes many forms, including amplifying content created by others. It's easier and often more effective to amplify an American voice rather than to try to imitate one.

The researcher behind the Q Origins Project cautions against putting too much weight on the theory that QAnon was created by Russians. We don't know exactly who Q is, but the researcher's investigations have convinced him that Q is primarily a domestic phenomenon. Q's writings show a deep familiarity with U.S. evangelical culture, he notes. The researcher observes that Q has an uncanny knack for distilling only those elements of /pol culture that would be acceptable on Fox News. Unlike his fellow chan anons, who have no compunctions about racial slurs, Q works just clean enough to be mainstream. In the researcher's opinion, navigating the subtleties of U.S. racial politics would be very difficult for someone who wasn't raised in the United States. Q also has a deep familiarity with US pop culture, particularly Hollywood movies. The famous "Where We Go One We Go All" slogan is from a 1996 Jeff Bridges sailing movie called White Squall, not the kind of material you'd expect an IRA troll to be familiar with. The researcher points out that the time stamps on the Q drops suggest that the author is working on West Coast time.

Whatever role Russia may have played in promoting this conspiracy theory, the real problem is that there's a huge market in the United States for conspiracy theories that promise the violent overthrow of democracy.

It's comforting to tell ourselves that QAnon is an exogenous phenomenon foisted upon us by a demonic Other. But that only distracts from the deeper rifts in our society that allow QAnon to flourish and thrive.

It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism

There’s a “strong authoritarian streak” that runs through parts of American evangelicalism, warns Elizabeth Neumann. What should be done about it?


POLITICO illustration/Getty Images


By ZACK STANTON
02/04/2021 POLITCO MAGAZIN
Zack Stanton is digital editor of Politico Magazine.


For two decades, the U.S. government has been engaging with faith leaders in Muslim communities at home and around the world in an attempt to stamp out extremism and prevent believers vulnerable to radicalization from going down a path that leads to violence.

Now, after the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory helped to motivate the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with many participants touting their Christian faith — and as evangelical pastors throughout the country ache over the spread of the conspiracy theory among their flocks, and its very real human toll — it’s worth asking whether the time has come for a new wave of outreach to religious communities, this time aimed at evangelical Christians.

“I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned from Trump administration in April 2020. The challenge in part is that, in this “particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all,” she says. “You don’t want ‘Big Brother’ calling the local pastor and saying, ‘Hey, here’s your tips for the week.’”


Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith. For this type of believer, love of God and love of country are sometimes seen as one and the same.

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Neumann says.

“[Christian nationalists] see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

How should the country, and the new administration, approach concerns about extremism among American Christians? What role can faith leaders play in trying to keep vulnerable believers from the temptations of conspiracy theories? And do the totems of American evangelicalism look at all different through the eyes of a national security expert?

To sort through all of this, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Neumann this week. A condensed transcript of that conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.

In May 2019, an FBI memo described QAnon as a domestic terror threat. You were still working at the Department of Homeland Security at the time. Do you remember when you first became aware of QAnon?

I remember asking my staff about it. I’d probably seen a news article about it and said, “Hey, are we concerned?” At the time, it struck us as this very random set of conspiracy theories. People in this country have followed conspiracy theories for years, and there are always those fringe elements you worry could be motivated to do something violent. It was definitely not seen as a high-level threat. It was kind of localized — you’re informing state and local law enforcement, “Hey, we’re seeing this activity,” so they might be better equipped to understand what’s driving it.

The DHS and FBI often put out bulletins that are just: “This is an incident that happened, this is what we assess it to mean, and here are the motivations or ideology.” It’s really there to provide context for law enforcement. In 2019, QAnon was more of the “huh, that’s new, but not really of concern” category.

When did it become a security concern for you?

The pandemic. QAnon was this fringe thing, it was concerning. Then, in 2020, it went on steroids.

In March, even before the shutdowns, I had my staff look at the research we use for developing behavioral indicators of individuals who might mobilize to violence. If we go down this path of having to all stay home, does that increase stress factors? Does it increase risk factors known to be common in people who carry out attacks? The answer was yes.

“QAnon was this fringe thing, it was concerning. Then, in 2020, it went on steroids.”

You started hearing the anti-government conspiracies — which was totally predictable. Anybody who has spent any time in Republican or libertarian politics knows you’re going to have people unhappy about the government. That’s fine; you can predict that. The question then is that if you know that’s going to be a challenge, what can the government do to help individuals understand why it is issuing stay-at-home orders, why it’s necessary, why it’s legal and constitutional? If the government had done a better job at that, we would have seen slightly less anger, slightly less of that victim-persecution complex.

With the pandemic, you had what was perceived to be government overreach; you had social isolation, which is a known risk factor [for extremism]; you had some people with a lot more time on their hands because they were not commuting, not taking kids to ballgames and not going to happy hour after work; you had economic stress — another known risk factor — as people lost jobs or moved to part-time status; you had people who lost loved ones. There was this great sense that people had lost control; our lives as we knew them had been upended.


People who had a strong, healthy sense of self or community were able to mitigate their isolation. But for individuals already on the cusp, this made them vulnerable. We use that word, “vulnerable,” to describe people who are not necessarily radicalized yet, but have factors in their lives that make it easier for them to move on a pathway towards extreme radicalized thought — and then, for a smaller subset, mobilizes them to violence.

That’s what we saw in 2020. We saw any number of people spending more time online looking for answers. You had increases in militia movements. The Moonshot CVE Group, which studies radicalization, said that in states with stay-at-home orders that lasted 10 days or longer, [online] searches for white-supremacist content increased by 21 percent. In states where there either weren’t stay-at-home orders or they lasted nine days or fewer, that increase was only 1 percent. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen, but we predicted that we would see violence in some form or fashion. The militia that attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — that was horrible, but not really shocking. The violence at protests? Not surprising. And the fact that you had white-supremacist groups using the protests to commit accelerationist violence was also not surprising — even though the president thought it was Antifa. We knew we were going to see more radicalization and violence.



“For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house.”


The combination of that on top of a pandemic, on top of a campaign where the president was sowing his own conspiracy theories and laying the groundwork for what eventually became [the lie] that the election had been stolen — well, some would say he started laying the groundwork four years ago. For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house. That kind of primordial soup makes conditions ripe for vulnerable individuals to move into this space. QAnon is not designed to be logical; it’s designed to meet these emotional and psychological needs.

Over the last year or so, a number of evangelical Christian leaders have shared their alarm at what they’re seeing with members of their churches being pulled into the QAnon world. You are a Christian raised in the evangelical faith. Do you see anything about the evangelical tradition that could make its believers more susceptible to QAnon?

I really struggle with this question. I’ve been trying to figure out how it is so obvious to me — and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. I actually do read the Bible. Yet there are people who read scripture and attend church but are also die-hard into believing the election was stolen or have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. What’s the distinction there? I find that hard to answer.

There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak, where they don’t believe in the infallibility of their pastor, but they act like it; they don’t believe in the infallibility of the head of the home, but they sometimes act like it; where you’re not allowed to question authority. You see this on full display in the criticisms of the way the Southern Baptist Convention is dealing with sexual abuse, which is so similar to the Catholic Church [sex abuse scandal]. There is this increasing frustration that church leaders have [this view]: “If we admit sin, then they won’t trust us to lead anymore.” But if the church is not a safe place to admit that you messed up, then I don’t know where is — or you clearly don’t believe what you preach.

“There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak.”

The authoritarian, fundamentalist nature of certain evangelical strands is a prominent theme in the places where you see the most ardent Trump supporters or the QAnon believers, because they’ve been told: “You don’t need to study [scripture]. We’re giving you the answer.” Then, when Rev. Robert Jeffress [a prominent conservative Baptist pastor in Dallas] says you’ve got to support Donald Trump, and makes some argument that sounds “churchy,” people go, “Well, I don’t like Trump’s language, but OK, that’s the right thing.” It creates people who are not critical thinkers. They’re not necessarily reading scripture for themselves. Or if they are, they’re reading it through the lens of one pastor, and they’re not necessarily open to hearing outside perspectives on what the text might say. It creates groupthink.

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom. It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology.

There was this whole movement in the ’90s and 2000s among conservatives to explain how amazing [America’s] founding was: Our founding was inspired by God, and there’s no explanation for how we won the Revolutionary War except God, and, by the way, did you know that the founders made this covenant with God? It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.

“When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

The elections in 2016 and 2020 were a fight in existential terms for believers of this teaching — meaning, if we allow Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden to be president, they are going to put the nail in the coffin [of the covenant], and the next thing we’re going to see is that Christianity is going to be outlawed, pastors will not be able to teach the Bible and Christians will become persecuted.

Now, here’s the caveat: Some of that fear is not out of thin air. There is a real “cancel culture,” where you see a mob mentality swarm on somebody who holds a biblically based viewpoint on, say, gay marriage, and you see someone forced out of a position or lose sponsorships or advertising. But they follow that to what they think is a logical conclusion — that eventually, pastors will not be able to preach against homosexuality or abortion, and if [they do], they’re going to end up arrested and unable to preach. I’ve heard that argument made multiple times over the last 10 years. The irrationality is the idea that there are no protections, that the courts wouldn’t step in and say, “No, the First Amendment applies to Christians as well.”

It tries to assert that they are losing power and must regain that power by any means necessary — which is why you can justify voting for Trump, so that we can, for God’s purposes, maintain this Christian nation. But that’s nowhere in scripture. Scripture, when it talks about what “Israel” is in the New Testament, it explains that it’s the church — which is not owned by any one nation; it’s a global church. And even if somehow you wanted to say that the American church is what [scripture is] referencing, [the Bible] tells us [to do] the exact opposite of what they’re talking about. We are told not to seek power. We’re told to be humble. We’re told to turn the other cheek. Jesus, in confronting Caesar’s representative at his trial, says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” “My fight is not here,” basically. Our purpose as believers is to be salt and light; it’s not to force everybody else to hold our beliefs.

To fix that, you really have to go back to scripture. You can’t just be like, “Christian nationalism is wrong.” You have to go back to what the Bible says, versus what you were taught as an American Christian, where it was so interwoven. It took me a while to even discover it. Once somebody pointed it out, [I was] like, “Oh, my gosh. I was taught that, and you’re right, that’s not correct.”

But it’s a very hard thing for people to [address], because it requires acknowledging that how you were raised or the people that you trusted either intentionally lied to you or were just wrong. It’s hard. It takes humility to go there. It’s a hard thing for people to recognize and escape from. But sadly, it’s a security issue that we have to address, because it has led to this.

“It requires acknowledging that how you were raised or the people that you trusted either intentionally lied to you or were just wrong.”

It sounds like you’re describing a reality for some evangelical Christians where their church is based more in culture than scripture — and that this makes them more susceptible to things like QAnon?

Oh, absolutely. Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a secular perspective: There’s text in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul is admonishing a church he helped establish: “You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still having to feed you with milk.” He’s basically saying, you should be 18, but you’re still nursing, and we need you to get it together.

There was a big movement in the ’90s called Seeker-Friendly Churches. Willow Creek [one of the most prominent of these churches] did a self-assessment about 10 or 15 years ago, and one of the things that they found is while they had converted people to Christians, there was a lack of growth in their faith. They were not learning the scriptures. They were not engaged in community. They were not discipling anybody. And [Willow Creek’s] assessment was: We failed. We baptized some people, but they’re not actually maturing.

One of my questions is: Are we seeing in the last four years one of the consequences of that failure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very easily led astray by what scripture calls “false teachers.” My thesis here is that if we had a more scripturally based set of believers in this country — if everybody who calls themselves a “Christian” had actually read through, I don’t know, 80 percent of the Bible — they would not have been so easily deceived.

For the nearly 20 years since 9/11, to counter violent extremism, the U.S. government has done outreach to imams and other faith leaders in Muslim communities. In light of the QAnon problem, should we be doing the same with leaders in evangelical Christian communities?

I think we need to learn from the mistakes of the last 20 years. And I am very mindful that there are places where things went very well [with Countering Violent Extremism outreach], and there are also places where things did not go well. It’s a mixed bag.

I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders in those communities. I don’t know that I’m a credible voice anymore because of my political outspokenness, but there certainly are pastors who are struggling with these questions: How do I help somebody that has gone down the QAnon rabbit hole? Or, to put it in biblical terms, how do I help somebody who has made Trump an idol?

Pastors, church leaders, faith leaders — when you frame it that way for them, the answers start to come: “Oh, we know how to do this.” Usually, pastors have done a lot of counseling or shepherding in their lifetimes. They know that you don’t approach people head-on with dogmatic arguments; that tends to not work. You need to recognize that there’s often something else going on that has made somebody vulnerable to being deceived, and coming out of that deception can be painful and humbling. But faith leaders — the good ones, at least — are perfect for that kind of work. So even though the particular topic itself may be different than they’re used to, they have many of the skill sets you need.

“For QAnon, January 20 may historically be looked at as a light-switch moment.”

Some of [what we need to do is] supporting them, because it’s disheartening work. It takes a long time for somebody to disengage. It’s usually not a light switch — although for QAnon, January 20 may historically be looked at as a light-switch moment. [QAnon lore has long held that on January 20th, Joe Biden would not be inaugurated, Donald Trump would remain president, declare martial law and many prominent political leaders would be arrested.] You’ve seen many people go, “Oh, I was conned,” and they’re out. But for others, it may be a longer journey.

Certainly, what they teach from their pulpits [is relevant], even going back to the basics. Scripture teaches us not to spend time in conspiracies. You don’t have to say anything about “stop the steal” or whatever. Or teach the Ten Commandments and the fact that bearing false witness and slander are actually what conspiracy theories do: You are believing made-up sets of “facts” about people you don’t have firsthand knowledge of.

There are ways pastors can address it. But it’s hard, and they need a community where they feel safe to be encouraged to do this work.

Your question is about the government. And I’m intentionally avoiding that — in part because, in this particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all. They probably would do more harm than good. The best thing they can do is provide fact-based resources — for example, threat briefings to educate [ordinary citizens] on signs of individuals who might be radicalizing into violence. Providing that information would be helpful, but you kind of want there to be a cut-out. You don’t want “Big Brother” calling the local pastor and saying, “Hey, here’s your tips for the week.” That’s just going to breed more conspiracies.

What can government do? Well, they’re resourced to help state and local governments, to do research, to identify best practices, to keep us informed about the threats, to give grant funding for prevention work. But those concepts are inherently built around the idea that it’s a multidisciplinary approach. And when we say “multidisciplinary,” it’s mental health, it’s human services, it’s education.

The disinformation problem is not going away. We can build more resilience. We can put more guardrails in place. But it’s going to be a problem for us for a long time.

Macho men: Historian explains how Trumpism is the rage of a threatened masculine ideal
History News Network
February 02, 2021


People take part in a protest for "Michiganders Against 

Excessive Quarantine" at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing. 

AFP / JEFF KOWALSKY.


As political leaders, Benito Mussolini and Donald Trump were macho men. Although the latter is no longer president, his mindset still rages across the nation and needs to be replaced by a nobler view of manhood.

Among the first twentieth-century macho leaders, Mussolini, who was "something of a rapist" and eventually claimed to have had 169 mistresses, was the most significant. Emphasizing virility and war, he once said, "War is to man what motherhood is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace."

In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat treats the Italian dictator as the first of many machismo rulers. Among others are former heads of state like Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, and now Trump, as well as present rulers like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey. She believes they "damage or destroy democracy and use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy. . . . Such rulers have exploited their countries' resources to satisfy their greed and [more recently] obstructed efforts to combat climate change. Their dependence on corruption and censorship and their neglect of the public good mean that they handle national crises badly and often bring ruin upon their people."

In dealing with Mussolini, Ben-Ghiat writes that as a young schoolteacher he was "known for carrying brass knuckles and sexually assaulting women." After World War I, in which he fought, he founded Fascist Combat Leagues that included many veterans. She believes that "the cults that rose up around Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1920s answered anxieties about the decline of male status," and she details Mussolini's leadership over Fascists who murdered "thousands of Socialists and left-leaning priests." (For more on the macho mindset under Mussolini, see here.)

Transitioning to Trump, his macho politics were evident until the end ofhis presidency--and beyond. They were commented on most recently by NPR political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben in her "Macho Politics Defined Trump's Presidency, Culminating With Capitol Riot" and The Atlantic journalist Megan Garber in her "The 'Pussy' Presidency."

Kurtzleben mentions Trump's pre-storming-the-Capitol speech of January 6, in which he made fun of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's small size, and noted it was typical of Trump to belittle "an opponent as weak while portraying himself and his supporters as strong."

Known for pasting labels on people, the hefty Trump, who weighs in (officially) at about 240 pounds, especially likes to literally belittle people by sticking "little" or "liddle" before their names, such as Liddle Adam Schiff (California congressman), Little Marco (for Sen. Rubio), Liddle Bob Corker (former Tenn. senator), or Little Michael (or Mini Mike for former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg).

Kurtzleben notes that Trump "has been unfailingly consistent in his fixation on being a tough guy--one with a very particular, combative form of masculinity." She quotes former chief of staff John Kelly saying that Trump can't admit mistakes because "his manhood is at issue here." And she recounts the response of Trump-campaign- spokesman Hogan Gidley after being asked if Trump felt "emasculated" because of social media's actions against him. Gidley's response? "I wouldn't say emasculated." He's "the most masculine person to ever hold the White House."

Both Kurtzleben and Garber mention Trump's urging of Vice President Mike Pence to aid the reversal of November election results: "You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy." Garber links this remark with Trump's earlier one in 2005 (not publicized until October 2016) that he could "do anything" he wanted with women, including grabbing them "by the pussy." She sees that early bragging as symptomatic of Trump's misogyny and dominating personality.

Trump's machoness, in Garber's view, is all about dominance and self-aggrandizement. "It rejects values typically associated with the feminine—compassion, collaboration, deference to expertise—as evidence of weakness." She believes that although he glorifies dominance, he is basically cowardly, having avoided military service and being subservient to "strongmen" like Putin.


Kurtzleben and Garber also comment on Trump's supporters. Kurtzleben cites a couple of reports that indicate that men, as well as women, who approve of dominating men were "likely to support Trump." Garber mentions all the "grotesquely masculine" symbols of the Capitol building occupiers (most of them white males): "the pelts, the horns, the capes, the exposed chests, the tactical gear."

Even if Trump's macho mindset was greater than that of previous presidents, it was not completely new. As historian John McCurdy has observed, "Beginning with the arrival of Columbus in 1492, the European conquest of America was built upon the sexual mistreatment of indigenous women, and the racialisation of gendered violence remained a constant throughout early America, growing more acute when African American slavery became the dominant form of labour."

In his Presidential Machismo: Executive Authority, Military Intervention, and Foreign Relations and in a HNN article (2002), historian Alexander DeConde examined macho behavior up to the early days of George W. Bush's presidency. (See here for more HNN articles on "masculinity.") My 2015 HNN essay "Putin vs. Obama: Macho Man' vs. Girly Boy'?" carries the consideration of presidential machismo up to the last president before Trump. There I mention that
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Republican attacks against Obama constantly charge that he is weak or feckless—code for unmanly?—regarding Putin, terrorists, Iran, and others. . . . At times, their polemics suggest that the main difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the former is the party of macho men and the latter of 'bleeding-heart liberals,' secular feminists, and 'sissy' eggheads.

Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) quotes a conservative writer's definition of an egghead as "a person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem." Many a conservative Republican thought of Adlai Stevenson (Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956) as just such an egghead.

Another example of machismo comes from author Philip Caputo, who recalled how as a young college student in 1960 he enrolled in a Marine Corps officer training program partly as a result of the romantic heroism of various war movies. He explained his motivation as such: "The heroic experience I sought was war; war, the ultimate adventure; war, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary. . . . Already I saw myself charging up some distant beachhead like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and then coming home a suntanned warrior with medals on my chest . . . I needed to prove something—my courage, my toughness, my manhood."

In her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes of Evangelicals admiring Wayne "for his toughness and his swagger" and how he came "to symbolize a different set of virtues—a nostalgic yearning for a mythical 'Christian America,' a return to 'traditional' gender roles, and the reassertion of (white) patriarchal authority."

(See also this review excerpted on HNN.)

Du Mez traces back white evangelicals' overwhelming support of Trump in 2016 to the 1960s and 1970s "threats of communism and feminism. Believing that the feminist rejection of 'macho' masculinity left the nation in peril, conservative white evangelicals promoted a testosterone-fueled vision of Christian manhood. In their view, America needed strong men to defend 'Christian America' on the battlefields of Vietnam and to reassert order on the home front." (Although declining slightly, three out of four white evangelicals still supported Trump in 2020).

Looking at Trump's support overall, "anxieties about the decline of male status"--as Ben-Ghiat phrased it regarding many Mussolini supporters in the 1920s--seems to be important. A 2008 study found that men felt "especially threatened by challenges to their masculinity," which was in "a precarious state requiring continual social proof and validation." And we know that many more men supported Trump than women; Trump's macho mindset was one way, unhealthy as it might be, of trying to bury male anxieties.

Supporting gun rights, keeping transgender people out of the military, opposing affirmative action, even refusing to wear a face mask--Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren's response to Biden's frequent mask wearing: "Might as well carry a purse with that mask, Joe"--all reflected such insecurity. In 2016 writer George Saunders expressed the belief that many Trump supporters suffered from what he called "usurpation anxiety syndrome," which he defined as "the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions." Immigrants, feminists, egghead professors, Black Lives Matter protesters, all might be perceived as such Others.

But how to assuage such anxieties, how to replace a macho mindset with a nobler view of manhood, and what that might be, is no easy matter. And a major rethinking of manhood is needed to help reduce political polarization.

In a 2015 essay I mentioned an insightful piece by David Masciotra that contrasted two opposing views of masculinity as presented in the films American Sniper and Selma. The first reflects machoism. The second, about Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil-rights protesters, displays a truer and nobler type of masculinity.

Although it may be a slower process than many of us wish, an increasingly critical view of Trump's macho masculinity is likely to emerge, weakened as it is by images of the Trump-inspired mob storming of the Capitol building and Trump's own sore-loser whimpering.

No one image or role model of masculinity will satisfy everyone. But whatever ones emerge should possess noble values, compassion as well as courage, humility as well as heroism. Such models will help us in the difficult task of restoring civility to American political discourse.

Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University, a Contributing Editor of HNN, and author of An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (2008). For a list of his recent books and online publications click here.

Trump aid delay snarled US unemployment systems: study

Agence France-Presse
February 02, 2021

Donald Trump in the White House. (Vasilis Asvestas / Shutterstock.com)

]The brief expiration of US pandemic unemployment benefits has left jobless workers waiting for billions of dollars and states struggling to reactivate the aid programs, a study said on Tuesday.

The lapse was caused by former president Donald Trump's days-long refusal to sign a $900 billion spending package passed by Congress in December that extended the aid programs first enacted when the pandemic hit.

The study from The Century Foundation progressive think tank finds that some US states still have not reactivated the programs, more than four weeks after they should have been able to resume paying benefits after Trump signed by the bill.

"This is money that these workers and their families needed to pay rent, put food on the table, stay out of poverty and keep America's economy running while they looked for work," the report said

As the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Congress passed the CARES Act that expanded the unemployment safety net by creating programs to help freelance workers and the long-term jobless.

But those were only authorized through the end of 2020, and in December Congress scrambled to pass a follow-up stimulus measure to keep them going as the pandemic wore on.

But Trump's refusal to sign the deal led to a one-day lapse in the programs, which the 53 US states and territories that administer the unemployment systems are still struggling to recover from.

As of January 30, only 40 states were making payments under the program for gig workers, and 12 of these had a delay of more than two weeks in restarting payments.

Thirty eight were making payments under the program for the long-term unemployed, but 15 states took more than two weeks to get the program up and running, The Century Foundation said.

All told, unemployed workers have lost out on $17.6 billion in benefits, though they will eventually receive checks with back payments for the weeks during which they weren't paid.

Nonetheless, the study warns the delay increased the stress for millions of people who have lost their jobs as the pandemic upended business in the United States.

"Put simply, a retroactive check in February can't be used to put food on the table in January," the study said.

Scores arrested in strike against parliament dissolution in Nepal
2021/2/4  ©Deutsche Presse-Agentur mbH

Protest against Parliament dissolution in Nepal - Political Leaders and cadres of the Nepal Communist party take part in a torch rally against Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and the dissolution of the Parliament. - Aryan Dhimal/ZUMA Wire/dpa

A nationwide strike called by a faction of Nepal’s ruling party protesting the dissolution of parliament began Thursday with sporadic clashes between police and protesters in the capital, Kathmandu.

At least 70 protesters including a former minister from the agitating faction of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) have been arrested while trying to enforce the strike, according to Nepal Police spokesperson Basanta Bahadur Kunwar.

"They are currently in our custody," Kunwar told dpa.

The strike has crippled normal life, with a disruption of traffic and a partial shutdown of businesses and services.

In Kathmandu, thousands of protesters rallied in the streets, chanting slogans against President Bidya Devi Bhandari and Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli for dissolving parliament.

One taxi was set on fire although no serious injuries have been reported, police said.

Thursday’s nationwide strike was the latest in a series of protests and counter protests that have rocked Nepal since Bhandari, acting on Oli’s recommendation, dissolved the legislature parliament in December and announced early general elections on April 30 and May 10.

Oli has said that he was forced to dissolve parliament after being blocked from carrying out his agenda by colleagues in the bloc, who had tried to oust him through a vote of no confidence. His opponents have called the dissolution unconstitutional. Several writ petitions have been filed against the dissolution and a constitutional hearing is ongoing in the supreme court.

Following the parliament's dissolution, the NCP has informally split with two factions describing themselves as the legitimate faction and asserting claims over the party’s election symbol and its name.

CNN exposes Trump-loving anti-vaxxers who have gotten rich at the expense of public health

Brad Reed RAW STORY
February 05, 2021



A new CNN expose reveals how some prominent anti-vaccination advocates have raked in cash while peddling what one expert describes as "snake oil" alternatives to vaccines.


In the segment, CNN reporter Drew Griffin showed how purported "alternative medicine" practitioners Ty and Charlene Bollinger organized their own "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6th in which they not only railed against the "stolen" 2020 presidential election, but they also attacked vaccinations.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told Griffin that at the heart of the Bollingers' pro-Trump and anti-vaxx initiatives is a single motive: Greed.

"These are snake oil salesman, the oldest kind of liar and seller of deceit, of misinformation," he explained. "Snake oil salesmen need to turn aa profit.

Griffin then goes on to document just how much the Bollingers have profited by noting that they live in a "7,600-square-foot, $1.5 million mansion in rural Tennessee."

The Bollingers make their money by selling informational videos on alternative medicines that cost up to $500 each, air purifiers that sell for $300, and an assortment of "body cleansers and other unproven health products" that come complete with fine-print disclaimers stating that they are not "intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or treat any disease."

Watch the video below.

'There was no trust': Apartheid ghosts stalk S.Africa's vaccine fears

Issued on: 05/02/2021 -

Jabbed: A South African volunteer in a trial last year of the 

Oxford-AstraZenca vaccine

 SIPHIWE SIBEKO POOL/AFP

Johannesburg (AFP)

At the very mention of the word "vaccine", 82-year-old Josefine Hlomuka vehemently shook her head, her face clouding with worry as she gazed at the storm bearing down on her home in the Johannesburg township of Soweto.

"We don't trust," whispered the former peanut seller, haunted by the four decades she spent under apartheid.

White-minority rule was swept away a generation ago but faith in South Africa's government today, its reputation undermined by corruption and incompetence, is poor.

Such deep-rooted distrust, say experts, lies behind vaccine scepticism that has flared since coronavirus hit the country last March.

Vaccine hesitancy is growing, even as leaders prepare a mammoth inoculation campaign set to begin this month.

The country hit hardest in Africa by the coronavirus aims to vaccinate around two-thirds of its 60 million-strong population by the end of 2021.

But fears span generations in Soweto's White City neighbourhood, where iron-domed roofs recall a time when the area hosted military barracks.

"I saw (online that) people are getting injected but they die," said Soweto-raised Tshegofatso Mdluli, 22, flashing two gold front teeth.

"What if most people get a third-grade kind of vaccine?" fretted Mbali Tshabalala, 35, sitting outside the terracotta walls of her home. "It gives me sleepless nights."

- Memories 'linger' -

Scepticism and suspicion have fed into a flurry of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.

"So-called rumours and myths have a basis in real anxieties," said Helen Schneider, a professor of public health at the University of the Western Cape.

And those anxieties in turn stem from "very concrete experiences," she said.

She pointed to the evidence of a secret apartheid-era chemical warfare programme in the 1980s to develop injections to curb the fertility of black citizens.

The head of that programme, cardiologist Wouter Basson -- dubbed "Dr Death" -- came back to haunt the public psyche last month.

It emerged he was still practising at private clinics, sparking outrage on social media.

Similar suspicions played out during the rollout of HIV treatment in the early 2000s.

"The end of apartheid was not far away, so you can easily imagine the parallels," said Doctors Without Borders veteran Eric Goemaere, recalling efforts to curb AIDS in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

"(Many thought) white people... invented something new to dominate (and) control."

- 'Don't believe WhatsApp' -

Public officials were trying to cut through misinformation long before South Africa's first batch of vaccines arrived on Monday.

"False information and fake news can and does put lives at risk," President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote in a weekly letter to the nation last month.

"We all need to work together to build confidence in the vaccine."

In a public webinar on vaccines hosted by the health ministry last week, microbiologist Koleka Mlisana urged listeners not to believe "everything you read in WhatsApp messages."

Tackling widely-disseminated stories one by one, she said "there are no microchips or tracking devices in vaccine bottles" and that "no vaccine will alter the DNA," before using global death figures to debunk a relatively common belief that the jabs are a ploy to "destroy Africans."

One January poll by Ipsos found that only 51 percent of South Africans would agree to get a coronavirus vaccine -- a 17 percent drop since October.

But another survey by the University of Johannesburg (UJ) suggested 67 percent of respondents were willing.

"Most South Africans generally do have positive attitudes to vaccinations," noted Sara Cooper, a senior scientist at the South African Medical Research Council.

Nevertheless, "the problem with vaccine hesitancy is that even small amounts can have big effects."

- 'They lie to us' -

Not all of South Africa's uncertainty hinges on conspiracy theories.

In fact, the UJ survey found that around half the 18 percent of respondents refusing to take the vaccine cited plots as the reason.

"They do play a role," Cooper said. "But there are more complex issues that receive less attention in the media that also play a big part."

Just as when AIDS was first spreading, civil society has pitched in alongside government to try to disseminate accurate information about coronavirus and upcoming vaccines.

Public figures such as anti-apartheid icon Desmond Tutu and opposition leader Julius Malema have also said they will get vaccinated.

But "there is a problem with top-down information," said Mocke Jansen Van Veuren, running a coronavirus workshop one rainy morning at a community hall in Soweto's impoverished Kliptown suburb, where anger towards the government repeatedly surfaced.

"Government is a suspicious source, unfortunately -- they lie to us about a lot of things."

Local distrust has also been compounded by global wariness over the speed at which pharmaceutical companies have developed and marketed their vaccines.

In the meantime, apartheid continues to cast a long, dark shadow.

"Black people and coloured people suffer from PTSD (trauma)," said one workshop participant, standing up to interrupt a presentation on coronavirus prevention.

"That is something the government is not even considering."

© 2021 AFP

$43 bn deal for 'world's biggest' offshore wind farm in South Korea

Issued on: 05/02/2021 -

A $43 billion deal for what the South Korean government says 

will be the world's largest offshore wind farm complex has

 been signed DON EMMERT AFP

Seoul (AFP)

A $43 billion deal was signed Friday to build what the South Korean government said will be the world's biggest offshore wind power complex, as it seeks to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

South Korea has few energy resources of its own and relies on imported coal -- a cheap but dirty fuel -- for around 40 percent of its electricity.

President Moon Jae-in declared the carbon neutrality goal last year but at the same time is looking to phase out nuclear power, leaving the country depending on renewables to square the circle.

Moon oversaw the signing of the 48 trillion won ($43 billion) agreement to build the complex off Sinan in the country's southwest, which he said would be seven times bigger than the world's current largest offshore wind farm.

With a maximum capacity of 8.2 gigawatts, the government is banking on it being the equivalent of six nuclear power stations.

Moon said that the country's position on the Korean peninsula gave it a geographical advantage.

"We have the infinite potential of offshore wind power to the sea on three sides, and we have the world's best technology in related fields," he added.

The agreement involves 33 different entities, among them regional governments, the electricity generator KEPCO, and major private firms including Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction and SK E&S.

Moon warned it could take more than five years to start construction, although the government will try to accelerate the process.

Seoul last year announced a target of becoming one of the world's top five offshore wind energy powerhouses by 2030.

South Korea also plans to cut its existing nuclear power plants -- currently the country's only significant low-carbon energy source -- from 24 to 17 by 2034, reducing the sector's energy output by nearly half.

© 2021 AFP