Evidence contradicts Taliban’s claim to respect women’s rights

There are signs of a return to something worryingly close to the hardline restrictions of the past across Afghan life

 

Afghan women protest to demand the preservation of their rights in front of the presidential palace in Kabul on Friday. Photograph: Reuters

Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul and Akhtar Mohammad Makoii
Fri 3 Sep 2021

When Taliban fighters moved into Herat city in western Afghanistan last month, one thing mattered more to some of them than the battle itself. As gunmen faced off around the governor’s office, a group of militants came to Shogofa’s* workplace and ordered all the women home.

“They hadn’t even taken all the city, but they came to our headquarters. The manager called an emergency meeting and they told all the women to leave,” she said.

As the main breadwinner for her widowed mother and disabled brother, losing her job means destitution. So on Thursday she decided to publicly challenge Afghanistan’s new rulers. With about 40 or 50 other women, she walked to the seat of city government chanting: “No fear, we are united.”

“We hoped we could tell the governor how we are struggling, but they let us stand there for some time then removed us – we couldn’t even meet him,” she said.

An Afghan woman speaks with a member of the Taliban during a protest in Herat on Thursday. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Since seizing Afghanistan, Taliban spokesmen and high officials have promised to respect women’s rights to work and education, albeit within an Islamic framework they refuse to define.

These pledges have prompted an international discussion about how much the Taliban have changed since they ruled the country with extreme and oppressive misogyny in the 1990s, barring women from almost all work and education.

There have been calls from abroad to give the group time to form a government and lay out its policy before pressing too hard on women’s rights. But there is increasing evidence from across Afghanistan that the biggest changes may be in messaging, rather than ideology.

Women protesting in Herat had been stripped of their jobs two weeks ago; reports from elsewhere include gunmen ordering bank tellers out of their jobs in Kandahar.

01:15 Women's rights will be respected 'within the limits of Islam', say Taliban – video

The Taliban have already asked most women to stay home, claiming it is a temporary measure for “security reasons”, but that explanation has an ominous ring to Afghan women whose memories stretch back to the last time the group held power.

“We heard some of these explanations in 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban said that the reason girls couldn’t study and women couldn’t work was because the security situation wasn’t good, and once the security situation was better they could go back. Of course that moment never arrived,” said Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.

“This indicates that even in the 1990s the Taliban felt the need to disguise some of their misogyny. So this is not an entirely new communications strategy they are pursuing now and Afghan women can see that.”

Other crippling rules from that period that have resurfaced unofficially, according to accounts from Afghan women, include a requirement for a male guardian, or mahram, to accompany them in any public space.

An Afghan man sells Taliban flags in Kabul on Friday. Photograph: EPA

Bano, another protester in Herat, works in healthcare, one sector where the Taliban have specifically called on women to come back to their jobs, but says she was ordered home for commuting alone.

Her husband, a soldier, has been missing in action for three years and with no adult sons or brothers nearby, she has no one to fill this role. “They said I should stay at home because I don’t have a mahram to accompany me to the entrance of the clinic,” she told the Guardian by phone.

She has been the sole breadwinner for three children since her husband went missing and she is getting desperate. “I am borrowing money from my friends and relatives in the city. We cannot go on like this.”

The women said they spoke for many others facing similar crises, but who were too frightened to come out on Taliban-controlled streets.

“We were there as their representatives, many of them sent us messages and shared our protest on social media,” said Shogofa. “We wanted to tell the world Afghan women are really struggling.”

In education, too, there are clear signs women will face extensive and damaging exclusion, even if restrictions do not go as far as the total ban of the 1990s.

Afghan women hold placards at protest in Herat. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The new higher education minister has said women and men must be separated at universities, and the historical consequences of services promoted as “separate but equal” within a discriminatory system strongly suggest that women will be pushed out or get a lower quality education.

A labyrinthine new decree to private universities, seen by the Guardian, lays out a long list of prescriptive, and likely expensive, rules to prevent male and female students even glimpsing each other’s faces during years of study.

Women must be provided with transport in buses with covered windows and a curtain separating them from the presumably male driver. They must be confined to a “waiting room” before and between classes, and the decree even details a required clothing colour for female students and teachers (black).


‘My homeland, my only love’: fleeing Afghans embrace 1998 song

All new classes must be segregated, and in current classes with under 15 women, a “sharia partition” must be erected to keep students of different gender apart. Ideally, teachers will also be separated by gender, the new rules say. “In the future, all universities should provide female teachers for women’s classes. They should also try to use older teachers with a good background,” the letter said.

Education officials were told in a meeting that women could never teach male students, although men might be able to teach women if there were no female lecturers available, a source told the Guardian.

Some women say they have already given up on their education, over fear of the Taliban’s new rules and their brutal past. “I don’t believe the Taliban. I’m scared of their rules and I’m concerned to lose my life for no reason under their control,” said one student, who lived in a hostel while studying in Kabul; she no longer thinks the Taliban will allow that.

“I had a plan to accelerate my studies and take more classes. I went to the gym after university. I had a plan to launch a small business for myself in Kabul, but everything vanished in a matter of hours. Words cannot describe my current depression.”

There are signs of a return to something worryingly close to the hardline restrictions of the past across other areas of Afghan life. Beauty salons have been ordered to paint over images of women and the Taliban have announced a ban on music, although it is not clear how strictly they plan to implement it.
Protesters in Kabul. Photograph: Reuters

Yet despite the gathering repression and the Taliban’s track record of brutality, Afghan women say they are determined to fight on. Women in Kabul came out to protest on Friday, inspired in part, one said, by the demonstrations in Herat.

They called for a role in government, after the Taliban ruled out any woman holding a cabinet level position. The Taliban fighters ripped up placards and attacked a male ally, but the women still plan to come out again, according to Fatima, a small-business manager who has been too afraid to open since the Taliban takeover.

“We have been through war, and conflict too, why should we be removed entirely from politics?”

*All names have been changed in this article to protect the women.


Additional reporting by Mursal Rasa.

'Not afraid, we are united': With Taliban close to forming govt, Afghan women protest

The Taliban carried out brutal and violent interpretations of Islamic law during their first regime and women were banned from school and work and denied freedom of movement.

By hindustantimes.com | Written by Meenakshi Ray, New Delhi
PUBLISHED ON SEP 03, 2021 

As many as 50 Afghan women in Afghanistan's western city of Herat protested on the streets in a rare, defiant protest for the right to work and over the lack of female participation in the new government to be formed by the Taliban, according to a report. The Taliban have said they were close to forming a new government as early as Friday, days after the US troops pulled out of Afghanistan amid chaos as desperate Afghans tried to flee the country.

Basira Taheri, one of the organisers of the protest, told AFP she wanted the Taliban to include women in the new cabinet. "We want the Taliban to hold consultations with us. We don't see any women in their gatherings and meetings," Taheri said on Thursday.

"It is our right to have education, work and security. We are not afraid, we are united," the demonstrators said, according to an AFP journalist who witnessed the protest in the relatively cosmopolitan city, where girls have already returned to school.

Also watch | How Afghan women hit the streets in Herat, refuse to bow down meekly to Taliban

  

Afghan women demand rights as Taliban seek recognition

By KATHY GANNON

1 of 9

Women gather to demand their rights under the Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. As the world watches intently for clues on how the Taliban will govern, their treatment of the media will be a key indicator, along with their policies toward women. When they ruled Afghanistan between 1996-2001, they enforced a harsh interpretation of Islam, barring girls and women from schools and public life, and brutally suppressing dissent. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)


KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A small group of Afghan women protested near the presidential palace in Kabul on Friday, demanding equal rights from the Taliban as Afghanistan’s new rulers work on forming a government and seeking international recognition.

The Taliban captured most of the country in a matter of days last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. Now they face the urgent challenge of governing a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.

The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a rollback of rights gained over the last two decades.



The protest in Kabul was the second women’s protest in as many days, with the other held in the western city of Herat. Around 20 women with microphones gathered under the watchful eyes of Taliban gunmen, who allowed the demonstration to proceed.

The women demanded access to education, the right to return to work and a role in governing the country. “Freedom is our motto. It makes us proud,” read one of their signs.

A Taliban fighter ventured into the crowd at one point, but witnesses said he was angry at the bystanders who had stopped to watch the demonstration and not the protesters themselves.

The Taliban have said women will be able to continue their education and work outside the home, rights denied to women when the militants were last in power. But the Taliban have also vowed to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, without providing specifics.

Interpretations of Islamic law vary widely across the Muslim world, with more moderate strains predominating. The Taliban’s earlier rule was shaped by Afghanistan’s unique tribal traditions, under which women are not to be seen in public. Those customs endure, especially in the countryside, even during 20 years of Western-backed governments.

A potentially more pressing concern for the Taliban is the economy, which is mired in crisis. Civil servants haven’t been paid for months, ATM’s have been shut down and banks are limiting withdrawals to $200 per week, causing large crowds to form outside them. Aid groups have warned of widespread hunger amid a severe drought.

The Taliban said Western Union, which halted service after the militants entered Kabul last month, will resume transfers, which may help Afghans to receive cash from relatives living abroad. But most of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves are held abroad and frozen while Western nations consider how to engage with the Taliban, putting pressure on the local currency.

There was no immediate comment from Western Union on the resumption of service.

The Taliban say they want good relations with all countries, even the United States, and have held a string of meetings with foreign envoys in recent days in the Gulf nation of Qatar, where they have long maintained a political office.

Western nations are expected to demand the Taliban live up to their promises to form an inclusive government and prevent Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorist groups. They may also press the Taliban on women’s rights, though that could be a harder sell for the group’s hard-line base, which is steeped in Afghanistan’s deeply conservative, tribal culture.

Ahmadullah Muttaqi, a spokesman for the Taliban’s cultural commission, said a senior official from the United Arab Emirates flew into Kabul’s international airport on Friday to meet with Taliban officials, without naming him. Afghanistan’s TOLO TV reported that the aircraft was also carrying 60 tons of food and medical aid.

Sher Mohammad Stanikzai, a senior Taliban official based in Qatar, recently met with British and German delegations, according to the Taliban, which said another official, Abdul Salam Hanafi, had a phone call with Chinese deputy foreign minister Wu Jianghao.




Most Western embassies were evacuated and shuttered in the days after the Taliban rolled into Kabul on Aug. 15. The Taliban have urged diplomats to return.

Taliban political leaders have gone on TV to say the world has nothing to fear from them. But many Afghans, as well as Western nations that spent two decades fighting the group, remain deeply skeptical.

Tens of thousands of Afghans fled the country after the Taliban takeover in a massive U.S.-led airlift out of Kabul international airport. The scenes of chaos, from Afghans clinging to military aircraft as they took off before falling to their deaths, to a suicide bombing that killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, marked a bitter end to America’s longest war.

The Taliban assumed control of the airport after the last American forces flew out and are now working to restore operations with technical experts from Qatar and Turkey. The Taliban say they will allow free travel for anyone with proper documents, but it remains to be seen whether any commercial airlines will offer service.

Officials from Pakistan International Airlines have met with Afghanistan’s still-independent civil aviation administration. But Abdullah Hafeez, a spokesman for the airline, said it will take “some time” to clean up the debris and restore normal operations.

“There is still a lot of work to be done before international flights can come into the airport,” he said.

______

Associated Press writer Tameem Akhgar in Istanbul, Turkey contributed to this report.

Afghan female mayor Zarifa Ghafari: 

'They lost the war to a small group of terrorists'
At 27, Zarifa Ghafari became one of the youngest female mayors in Afghanistan. She campaigned for women's rights — and received death threats for it. After the Taliban took power, she found refuge in Germany. DW met her in the town of Hilden.

VIDEO

https://p.dw.com/p/3zqGQ

Defiant Afghan women held a rare protest Thursday saying they were willing to accept the burqa if their daughters could still go to school under Taliban rule. "It is our right to have education, work and security," the group of around 50 female demonstrators chanted, waving placards on the streets of Afghanistan's western city of Herat.

Canadian senator hears desperate plea from Afghan woman MP fearing Taliban reprisals



A senator who chairs a committee set up to forge ties between the Canadian and Afghan parliaments has been receiving desperate pleas for help from Afghan politicians.

Sen. Salma Ataullahjan says she has received daily appeals for help to escape the Taliban from Afghans she met on official parliamentary business.

One Afghan woman MP told the senator that her car has been confiscated and that she is in hiding while trying to find a way to leave the country.

Ataullahjan, who was brought up in Pakistan and is Pashtun — the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan — said she has been inundated with calls from Afghans, including journalists, fearing for their safety.

They include Afghan politicians she met as co-chair of the Canada-Afghanistan Parliamentary Friendship Group and as vice-president of Canada’s Inter-Parliamentary Union, which fosters ties between parliaments.

The senator said she receives pleas each day from Afghans, including those who helped Canadian NGOs and are unable to get out.

She said one such woman was beaten up at the airport trying to flee with her children and is now “in hiding.”

“On a daily basis I am getting cries for help,” she said. “This woman MP I met said ‘I fear for my safety. We have nothing, even our cars, everything has been taken away.’”

Ataullahjan sits in the Conservative caucus and is the first person of Pakistani origin to be appointed to the Senate. She speaks Pashto, which is widely spoken in Afghanistan, and is the daughter of a Pakistani senator and granddaughter of Bacha Khan, who led an independence movement from British rule. As a child, she used to holiday in Kabul and lived near the Afghan border.

She held the last official meeting of the Canada-Afghanistan Parliamentary Friendship Group via Zoom on July 29. The meeting heard reports of targeted killings of religious scholars, women, members of the LGBTQ community, artists and journalists.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, the senator said she fears for Afghan women, including those who were in positions of power.

“If you are a female you are in jeopardy. They (The Taliban) hate outspoken women,” she said.

She said she is contacted every day by desperate Afghans via WhatsApp, phone, email and Zoom. But she said wifi is “sporadic” and it is becoming harder for them to stay in touch.

The senator expressed frustration with the lack of response from Canadian authorities when she has requested help for Afghans in peril to leave the country.

“When we have applied for people under threat, we haven’t heard anything,” she said.

The Liberal government has been repeatedly criticized for not acting quickly enough to save Afghans with ties to Canada. A special immigration program for those who helped Canada with its military mission in Afghanistan has been plagued by bureaucratic and technical problems.

Ataullahjan instigated a Parliamentary report in 2010 which recommended that plans be set out to support women in Afghanistan after Canada's combat mission ended.

The report by the Senate Committee on Human Rights did not anticipate the country being retaken by the Taliban.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 3, 2021.

The Canadian Press

As female journalists flee Afghanistan, the future looks dire for media freedom

While individual countries try to do what they can for those caught up in the mayhem, international pressure is lacking

‘I’m so unhappy because this generation really struggled for a new Afghanistan.’ Beheshta Arghand in Doha. 

Photograph: Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters

Jane Martinson

THE GUARDIAN
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

When Beheshta Arghand questioned a Taliban spokesman live on Afghan television two weeks ago, the very fact that he was prepared to answer a woman led to hopes that the Islamist group had changed. Within a week, we now learn, the young journalist had left Afghanistan.

She is not alone. Despite Taliban promises to protect the rights of women to go to school and work, few on the ground appear to believe them. Even as their spokesman spoke of respect for human rights, the Taliban had already taken two female state broadcasters off air and attacked and beaten many journalists.

A report this week found that of 700 female journalists working in Kabul before the takeover, fewer than 100 are left. A handful of women continue to work outside the capital, in the provinces taken over by the Islamist group before Kabul fell, according to Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) and the Centre for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists.

Speaking from Qatar, Arghand, 24, was close to tears: “I’m so unhappy because this generation really struggled for a new Afghanistan.” She called on the international community to help and said she hoped to “become the voice of women because they are in a very bad situation”.

While things appear bleak for all women in Afghanistan, female journalists face the double whammy of doing a job disliked by the powerful everywhere. Arghand said that the Taliban had told local media to stop discussing their takeover: “When you can’t [even] ask easy questions, how can you be a journalist?”

Thousands of Afghan journalists have tried to leave the country in recent weeks. The “list” of journalists seeking help with visas and other documentation has grown to a “directory”, according to Christophe Deloire, secretary general of the RSF.

While the situation has never been easy for journalists in the region, increasing press freedom is seen by several relevant watchdogs as one of the main achievements since Nato forces defeated the Taliban 20 years ago. Today Afghanistan is home to hundreds of different media outlets, broadcasting in a variety of languages. One-fifth of the country’s 10,000 media workers are women: there are even female-led media outlets that produce content solely for women. Yet in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover, the airwaves are now, like the streets, populated almost entirely by men.

Much has been written about the warnings from within the country ignored in the rush to withdraw by Nato forces. These include warnings that the Taliban’s new apparently media-savvy ways were still dangerous for journalists and particularly female journalists. Najib Sharifi, head of the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee, said in May: “Journalists are at the forefront of violence in Afghanistan.” He warned that targeted killings had already led to “a lot of self-censorship”, while the number of female journalists declined by 18% in the first six months of the year.

With hundreds of journalists reporting direct threats last year, the UN finds that more than 30 media workers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2018. A list compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists cites the Taliban as more likely to be perpetrators than any other individual group. Yet the committee’s pleas, along with those of 50 other civil rights groups, for the G7 nations to stay in Kabul after 31 August to help provide safe passage for the thousands trying to flee as well as journalists still trying to work there were largely ignored.


Afghanistan: fewer than 100 out of 700 female journalists still working

Individual countries have sought to help journalists in the mayhem of the past few weeks. A coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters, including the Guardian, worked with the Foreign Office to provide visa waivers for more than 200 Afghan journalists who worked with the British media. Efforts to help those left behind, some stranded by their failure to reach the airport in time, are still highly sensitive.

The outlook on an individual level is dire, but international efforts give little cause for hope either. G7 member countries are all part of the Media Freedom Coalition and signatories to the global pledge on media freedom. But there was little concrete action at last week’s meeting of the G7, and now there is talk of a meeting of the G20 after the UN general assembly in September, in which those well-known bastions of free speech, China and Russia, will be included in efforts to insist the Taliban stop terrorising all journalists, and particularly women.

The hope is that these countries can help convince the Taliban leadership that times have changed in the past 20 years. Deloire at the RSF says he is “neither optimistic nor pessimistic” as his organisation tries to help those left behind by talking to the Taliban. “We continue to speak with them to try to secure commitments which go beyond promises given during a press conference … We might not be going back to what happened in ’96. Today’s Taliban are not yesterday’s Taliban.”

Along with their first interview with a female journalist in Afghanistan, the early days of their takeover suggested that the Taliban recognised the importance of the media after the growth of the internet and social media since 2001. They used WhatsApp, and a film crew from the Qatari-backed television news channel Al Jazeera even livestreamed the moment Taliban fighters gained access to Kabul’s presidential palace.

Arghand’s boss at Tolo News, Saad Mohseni, said on 17 August that the Taliban were trying to win over local people and placate watching western governments. “It’s important for them to win hearts and minds, and show the internationals that they’re legitimate and that they’re folks you can work with. In this phase the media will have a great deal more freedom than in the latter phases.”

This initial phase appeared to have lasted just a matter of days. On 1 September, Mohseni, an Afghan-Australian citizen and owner of Afghanistan’s biggest news and entertainment network, said he was having to hire new people as all his well-known journalists had already left the country.


Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M IS ADDICTION

Juul hooked an entire generation on nicotine – can it redeem its image?

The company has been shamed by health regulators, lost revenue and is the center of hundreds of US lawsuits. Now it has thrown in a last-ditch effort to continue sales

For now, Juul’s future in the US is in the hands of the FDA. Illustration: Rita Liu/The Guardian


Wudan Yan
Thu 2 Sep 2021

More than a decade ago, Adam Bowen and James Monsees became friends over their smoke breaks at Stanford University. They were graduate students when they first conceived of the idea behind Juul: conventional cigarettes, like the ones they couldn’t stop smoking, were bad not because of nicotine, but for all the other chemicals from burnt tar.

The pair had a vision: design a device that would deliver solely nicotine, offer a better experience for smokers and help those who wanted to quit cigarettes.


The great vape debate: are e-cigarettes saving smokers or creating new addicts?

That idea has morphed into Juul, the leading e-cigarette company, which some have accused of hooking teenagers on nicotine.

A sizable number of young people who developed a vaping habit after using Juul have then sought out cheaper, alternative products to satisfy their fix: black market pods laced with vitamin-E acetate and other toxins that have led to more than 2,800 counts of lung injury in the US and two of its territories. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 68 deaths in the US have been confirmed to be linked to those black market pods.

Now, Juul is at the center of a string of lawsuits for knowingly addicting a generation.

Juul has faced heavy criticism for its initial botched marketing to teens – they offered flavors like mint, mango and creme brulee, all of which tantalized teens up until 2018, when they removed flavors from stores, and fall 2019, when they took them offline. Yet some research suggests that for adult smokers, Juul and similar products might be some of the best tools out there to quit smoking.

Now that Juul has been publicly shamed, disciplined by health regulators, lost significant revenue, and is the center of hundreds of lawsuits in the US related to teen use of their devices, the company has thrown in a last ditch effort to stay on the market: they’ve appealed to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow them to continue their sales.

If the FDA rejects the appeal, Juul is given the boot. But if its application is approved, can Juul revive its image, regain public trust and position itself as a public health boon?

With half a million smokers still dying every year from illnesses caused by or related to smoking, it’s vital to find better ways to get people off cigarettes altogether, says Nancy Rigotti, the director of Massachusetts general hospital’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Center in Boston. Smoking cessation tools such as nicotine gum or patches are generally ineffective, as many smokers relapse, she says, which means alternatives are needed.

When e-cigarettes first hit the market, public health researchers were intrigued to see whether they could help smokers quit. Smokers would still get the hand-to-mouth movement with the device, inhale as they would normally, and get a hit of nicotine at the back of their throat.

Juul products displayed at a smoke shop in New York in 2018. 

Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

“Anecdotally, e-cigarette users have said that they have used [e-cigarettes] to quit smoking,” says Alison Breland, who co-leads the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products, a research program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

That’s because e-cigarettes contain more nicotine than conventional cigarettes – they contain about 12mg each – which helps users satisfy their addiction.

By comparison, patches vary in strength, from 7-22mg a patch, but needs to get through human skin in order to have an effect. And nicotine gum leads to markedly lower levels of blood nicotine compared with smoking a cigarette.

Small studies in recent years show that if there’s more nicotine in the e-cigarette, more ends up in your blood. E-cigarettes are therefore more effective than gum and patches because of that additional nicotine – it eases withdrawal symptoms, and could possibly help people get off cigarettes – although the jury’s still out if they can get people off nicotine altogether.

In the UK, the government has gone as far as to launch a public health campaign that “show middle-aged men with beards vaping”, Bauld says. E-cigarettes are largely seen as a public health good in the country – they are even sold in pharmacies appended to hospitals – because they are viewed as a medical intervention for smoking cessation.

One study published in 2019 in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that adult British smokers were twice as likely to quit cigarettes if they switched over to e-cigarettes, compared with smokers who switched to the patch or gum. (Breland’s excitement over the results is tempered, however, as it was only an 18% quit rate for people who used e-cigarettes in the trial and received intensive counseling, compared with 9% using gums and patches.)

Meanwhile, the explosion of e-cigarettes in the US, which has mostly been led by Juul, was largely due to its early marketing and advertising efforts that made using the e-cigarettes look cool.

Within the first six months Juul was on the market, the company purchased advertisement space on Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network and teen magazines. In magazines, readers would find girls wearing high ponytails and crop tops holding a Juul. Other advertisements enticed readers to join JUUL’s launch parties, showing blonde girls donning distressed denim jeans while casually holding a JUUL.

Given the potential that e-cigarettes could have, there may be lessons for the regulators in the US and Juul to keep in mind moving forward.

Dorian Fuhrman, the founder of the advocacy group Parents against Vaping, knows the struggle of teens getting hooked onto Juul all too well.

Her son, Phillip, got introduced to Juul in 2017 at age 14 when a friend handed him a device. He had never used nicotine before. At first, he and his friends vaped Juul’s mint pods. Fuhrman isn’t sure how much her son vaped, but she knows he felt the cumulative effects of it when he tried out for the basketball team and had trouble breathing.

Over the years, Fuhrman has watched her son become moody and volatile during periods of withdrawal. When he tried to quit, his doctor recommended the patch and nicotine gum – which both worked only in the short term. He has also tried to go cold turkey, but has fallen back on Juul during times of stress, Fuhrman says.

Before spring 2018, when e-cigarette growth was still unchecked by regulators, Juul even went as far as to send representatives to schools, including the one that Fuhrman’s son attended. The representatives claimed – without evidence – that Juuls were safer than traditional cigarettes, describing Juuls as the “iPhone of e-cigarettes” to the students.

“When we heard that, we were just horrified,” Fuhrman says. That was the moment she decided to start Parents Against Vaping.

“They really went wrong with the marketing to children,” says Breland. “The aggressive marketing, marketing in schools, all the flavors – that’s their downfall. I don’t know how they’d recover from that.”

A high school principal in Massachusetts displays vaping devices that were confiscated from students in 2018. 

Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

Even though the company has taken flavored pods off the market as part of their “reset”, leaving only menthol and Virginia tobacco on the market, Fuhrman’s son has switched to menthol and flavored disposable e-cigarettes manufactured by brands other than Juul.

“It’s classic: kids will just go to what’s left on the market,” Fuhrman says. “You can’t leave any flavor on the market; kids will gravitate towards that flavor.”

In other words, for Juul to be a public health good, it won’t just be a matter of regulating JUUL – but all other e-cigarette products.

After the FDA disciplined Juul in 2018 for the ads and marketing to teens, some employees still believed that they were working towards making a good smoking cessation product and were trying to avoid getting nonsmokers hooked on Juul. The company website has since built an entire section of its webpage that lists the measures they are taking to prevent Juul from getting into the hands of teens.

One former Juul employee hired in 2018 told me that during his orientation at the company, new employees were told, “If you don’t smoke, please don’t start using the product,” since any product containing nicotine can become addictive. Another employee in late 2019 said that Juuls helped him get off conventional cigarettes, and that he hadn’t touched one since he began work at Juul.

During his tenure there, the former employee thought most of his colleagues believed Juul was being misrepresented by the media. “The narrative around the company had gotten so negative that it was almost ridiculous, even though internally we felt like we were doing all we could to mitigate the situation. No one really wanted teenagers to be using the product,” he says. (This employee asked to be kept anonymous for fear of retribution, as he signed a nondisclosure agreement with Juul.)

That year, after intense pressure from regulators, Juul removed flavored pods from stores and put them only on their website, where customers had to pass the 21-age requirement to buy them. A year later, JUUL decided to pull those flavors from their website, leading to a further decrease in the company’s revenue.

Last summer, Juul, along with hundreds of other e-cigarette companies, submitted its pre-market tobacco applications to the FDA. These applications are meant for new e-cigarette or tobacco products to prove that they are a public health good.

FDA approval of these applications means that the agency has deemed that the public health good of a product outweighs the possible risks. A company spokesperson for Juul told the Guardian that their impetus for seeking FDA approval was to become a “science- and evidence-based company, engage in open and transparent dialogue with our stakeholders, and take methodical and responsible actions to advance the potential for harm reduction for adult smokers while combating underage usage”.

KC Crosthwaite, Juul’s current CEO, said in a statement last year: “I’m fully aware that building a risk-proportionate regulatory framework will take time. Yet I am ultimately optimistic about the future.” (Bowen and Monsees, the original cofounders, have stepped down after acknowledging that the company had made missteps.)

Even though the application is not public and can’t be shared via public records request, some of the studies the company submitted as part of the application appeared in the May/June issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior. According to the New York Times, Juul paid the journal $51,000 for the special issue.

The studies largely focused on adult usage and switch rates, rather than outcomes tied to teen use of their product. Over the year, Juul’s studies showed that adults who used Juul reduced conventional cigarette consumption by more than 50% – all the while switching over to Juul. The one paper that focused on underage use suggested that Bluetooth technology can help verify the user’s age to curb teenage sales.

Fuhrman, the anti-vaping advocacy group founder, is adamant that “no e-cigarette is a public health good for teens”, citing studies that show teenagers who start on devices like Juul will later move on to combustible cigarettes. Her fear is that the FDA will approve any flavored or menthol flavored e-cigarettes, including Juul – a single loophole could continue addicting teenagers, she says.

Like any new technology, it’s just too early to say what the long-term impact of e-cigarettes will be. It took decades for public health officials to declare that conventional cigarettes were a hazard. For smoking, for instance, individuals will have quit if they have gone seven years without a cigarette, explains David Gortler, former senior adviser to the FDA commissioner on policy and drug safety. Simply put, not enough time has passed to suggest that vaping is safer than burning tobacco, Gortler says.

For now, however, Juul’s future in the US is in the hands of the FDA, which has a near-impossible task to balance the impact that Juul has had on underage nicotine use with the hopeful benefits of harm reduction from cigarettes, with data that we currently do not have.

Misinformation on Twitter adversely affects adults’ health decisions

A new study is the first to explore the effect of misinformation on Twitter about e-cigarette harms.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

Video: https://youtu.be/fsS6FVq3jd4

UK and US adult smokers who were considering using e-cigarettes were deterred when exposed to tweets falsely implying the devices are more harmful than conventional cigarettes, finds new research. The study, published in BMJ Open and led by researchers at the University of Bristol (UK) and the University of Pennsylvania (US), is the first to examine the effect of this type of exposure which has important implications for public health.

While existing studies have examined current perceptions of e-cigarette harms, little is known about the role of exposure to misinformation on social media on these perceptions, and consequently on e-cigarette intentions and use. 

In this Cancer Research UK (CRUK)- funded study, researchers from Bristol’s medical school and Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication recruited 2,400 adult smokers from the US and UK who were not currently using e-cigarettes to take part in an online randomized controlled experiment to assess the effect of exposure to misinformation about e-cigarette harms on Twitter on adult current smokers’ intention to quit smoking cigarettes. They also assessed their intention to purchase e-cigarettes and their perceived relative harm of e-cigarettes compared to regular cigarettes.

Participants were shown different types of health-related information and asked for their opinions about e-cigarettes, and were asked questions on their intention to quit smoking, intention to purchase e-cigarettes, and perceived relative harm of e-cigarettes compared to regular cigarettes. After randomization, they were asked to view one tweet at a time in random order (four tweets in total) and were asked brief questions about each tweet, in terms of the perceived effectiveness of the tweet; likelihood of replying, retweeting, liking, and sharing the tweet; and their emotional response to the tweet.

Results showed that US and UK adult current smokers were deterred from considering using e-cigarettes even after brief exposure to tweets that e-cigarettes are as or more harmful than smoking, suggesting that misinformation about e-cigarette harms may adversely influence adult smokers’ decisions to consider using e-cigarettes as a way of stopping smoking. Conversely, the results found that US adult current smokers may be encouraged to use e-cigarettes and view them as less harmful than regular cigarettes, after exposure to tweets that e-cigarettes are completely harmless.

Andy Tan, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Health Communication & Equity Lab, explains: “This is the first study to explore the effect of exposure to misinformation about e-cigarette harms on Twitter among smokers. These findings are important because they show that even brief exposure to misinformation about e-cigarettes may be hindering efforts to reduce the burden of tobacco smoking on current smokers in the US and UK.”

Dr. Caroline Wright, Senior Research Associate and CRUK Population Research Postdoctoral Fellow from Bristol Medical School and the study’s lead author, said: “Health information is commonly accessed online, with recent reports showing around 63 percent of UK adults using the internet to look for health-related information, and 75 percent of US adults using the internet as their first source of health information. People are increasingly encountering free and publicly available health information through social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. However, this ease of accessing information comes at a cost as the spread of misinformation can have negative consequences on people’s health choices and behaviour. Given this, we would remind smokers that although e-cigarettes are not completely harmless, their short-term health risks are considerably lower than smoking regular cigarettes. We would encourage smokers accessing information online to check their national health agency for accurate information about e-cigarettes.

“For health care providers we recommend being aware that your patients may have been influenced by misinformation on social media, and therefore may have misperceptions about e-cigarettes. Correct misperceptions, and consider the ways you can support your patients, so they are able to identify accurate health information. And finally, for policy makers: ensure that all social media searches associated with e-cigarettes are flagged with official health guidance, regulate all forms of misinformation on social media, and improve population awareness and skills to seek out accurate information.”

The study is funded by a Cancer Policy Research Centre Innovation grant and Cancer Research UK (CRUK).

Paper

‘Effects of brief exposure to misinformation about e-cigarette harms on twitter: a randomised controlled experiment’ by Wright C, Williams P, Elizarova O, et al in BMJ Open 2021;0:e045445. doi:10.1136/ bmjopen-2020-045445

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JOURNAL

BMJ Open

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Effects of brief exposure to misinformation about e-cigarette harms on twitter: a randomised controlled experiment

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Sep-2021

Has Covid ended the neoliberal era?

The year 2020 exposed the risks and weaknesses of the market-driven global system like never before. It’s hard to avoid the sense that a turning point has been reached


Composite: Guardian Design/AFP/Getty/Shutterstock/Xinhua/EPA/Reuters

The long read

by Adam Tooze
Thu 2 Sep 2021 

If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on 20 January 2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States precisely a year later, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of 12 months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions severely ill. Today the official death tolls stands at 4.51 million. The likely figure for excess deaths is more than twice that number. The virus disrupted the daily routine of virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, separated families, interrupted travel and upended the world economy.

To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses and markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the sharpest economic recession experienced since the second world war, it was qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no other”.

Even before we knew what would hit us, there was every reason to think that 2020 might be tumultuous. The conflict between China and the US was boiling up. A “new cold war” was in the air. Global growth had slowed seriously in 2019. The IMF worried about the destabilising effect that geopolitical tension might have on a world economy that was already piled high with debt. Economists cooked up new statistical indicators to track the uncertainty that was dogging investment. The data strongly suggested that the source of the trouble was in the White House. The US’s 45th president, Donald Trump, had succeeded in turning himself into an unhealthy global obsession. He was up for reelection in November and seemed bent on discrediting the electoral process even if it yielded a win. Not for nothing, the slogan of the 2020 edition of the Munich Security Conference – the Davos for national security types – was “Westlessness”.

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Apart from the worries about Washington, the clock on the Brexit negotiations was running out. Even more alarming for Europe as 2020 began was the prospect of a new refugee crisis. In the background lurked both the threat of a final grisly escalation in Syria’s civil war and the chronic problem of underdevelopment. The only way to remedy that was to energise investment and growth in the global south. The flow of capital, however, was unstable and unequal. At the end of 2019, half the lowest-income borrowers in sub-Saharan Africa were already approaching the point at which they could no longer service their debts.

The pervasive sense of risk and anxiety that hung around the world economy was a remarkable reversal. Not so long before, the west’s apparent triumph in the cold war, the rise of market finance, the miracles of information technology, and the widening orbit of economic growth appeared to cement the capitalist economy as the all-conquering driver of modern history. In the 1990s, the answer to most political questions had seemed simple: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As economic growth transformed the lives of billions, there was, Margaret Thatcher liked to say, “no alternative”. That is, there was no alternative to an order based on privatisation, light-touch regulation and the freedom of movement of capital and goods. As recently as 2005, Britain’s centrist prime minister Tony Blair could declare that to argue about globalisation made as much sense as arguing about whether autumn should follow summer.

By 2020, globalisation and the seasons were very much in question. The economy had morphed from being the answer to being the question. A series of deep crises – beginning in Asia in the late 90s and moving to the Atlantic financial system in 2008, the eurozone in 2010 and global commodity producers in 2014 – had shaken confidence in market economics. All those crises had been overcome, but by government spending and central bank interventions that drove a coach and horses through firmly held precepts about “small government” and “independent” central banks. The crises had been brought on by speculation, and the scale of the interventions necessary to stabilise them had been historic. Yet the wealth of the global elite continued to expand. Whereas profits were private, losses were socialised. Who could be surprised, many now asked, if surging inequality led to populist disruption? Meanwhile, with China’s spectacular ascent, it was no longer clear that the great gods of growth were on the side of the west.
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And then, in January 2020, the news broke from Beijing. China was facing a full-blown epidemic of a novel coronavirus. This was the natural “blowback” that environmental campaigners had long warned us about, but whereas the climate crisis caused us to stretch our minds to a planetary scale and set a timetable in terms of decades, the virus was microscopic and all-pervasive, and was moving at a pace of days and weeks. It affected not glaciers and ocean tides, but our bodies. It was carried on our breath. It would put not just individual national economies but the world’s economy in question.

As it emerged from the shadows, Sars-CoV-2 had the look about it of a catastrophe foretold. It was precisely the kind of highly contagious, flu-like infection that virologists had predicted. It came from one of the places they expected it to come from – the region of dense interaction between wildlife, agriculture and urban populations sprawled across east Asia. It spread, predictably, through the channels of global transport and communication. It had, frankly, been a while coming.

There have been far more lethal pandemics. What was dramatically new about coronavirus in 2020 was the scale of the response. It was not just rich countries that spent enormous sums to support citizens and businesses – poor and middle-income countries were willing to pay a huge price, too. By early April, the vast majority of the world outside China, where it had already been contained, was involved in an unprecedented effort to stop the virus. “This is the real first world war,” said Lenín Moreno, president of Ecuador, one of the hardest-hit countries. “The other world wars were localised in [some] continents with very little participation from other continents … but this affects everyone. It is not localised. It is not a war from which you can escape.”

Lockdown is the phrase that has come into common use to describe our collective reaction. The very word is contentious. Lockdown suggests compulsion. Before 2020, it was a term associated with collective punishment in prisons. There were moments and places where that is a fitting description for the response to Covid. In Delhi, Durban and Paris, armed police patrolled the streets, took names and numbers, and punished those who violated curfews. In the Dominican Republic, an astonishing 85,000 people, almost 1% of the population, were arrested for violating the lockdown.

Even if no violence was involved, a government-mandated closure of all eateries and bars could feel repressive to their owners and clients. But lockdown seems a one-sided way of describing the economic reaction to the coronavirus. Mobility fell precipitately, well before government orders were issued. The flight to safety in financial markets began in late February. There was no jailer slamming the door and turning the key; rather, investors were running for cover. Consumers were staying at home. Businesses were closing or shifting to home working. By mid-March, shutting down became the norm. Those who were outside national territorial space, like hundreds of thousands of seafarers, found themselves banished to a floating limbo.

President Xi Jinping in January 2020.

 Photograph: Nareshkumar Shaganti/Alamy

The widespread adoption of the term “lockdown” is an index of how contentious the politics of the virus would turn out to be. Societies, communities and families quarrelled bitterly over face masks, social distancing and quarantine. The entire experience was an example on the grandest scale of what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the 80s dubbed “risk society”. As a result of the development of modern society, we found ourselves collectively haunted by an unseen threat, visible only to science, a risk that remained abstract and immaterial until you fell sick, and the unlucky ones found themselves slowly drowning in the fluid accumulating in their lungs.

One way to react to such a situation of risk is to retreat into denial. That may work. It would be naive to imagine otherwise. Many pervasive diseases and social ills, including many that cause loss of life on a large scale, are ignored and naturalised, treated as “facts of life”. With regard to the largest environmental risks, notably the climate crisis, one might say that our normal mode of operation is denial and willful ignorance on a grand scale.

Facing up to the pandemic was what the vast majority of people all over the world tried to do. But the problem, as Beck said, is that getting to grips with the really large-scale, all-pervasive risks that modern society generates is easier said than done. It requires agreement on what the risk is. It also requires critical engagement with our own behaviour, and with the social order to which it belongs. It requires a willingness to make political choices about resource distribution and priorities at every level. Such choices clash with the prevalent desire of the last 40 years to depoliticise, to use markets or the law to avoid such decisions. This is the basic thrust behind neoliberalism, or the market revolution – to depoliticise distributional issues, including the very unequal consequences of societal risks, whether those be due to structural change in the global division of labour, environmental damage, or disease.

Coronavirus glaringly exposed our institutional lack of preparation, what Beck called our “organised irresponsibility”. It revealed the weakness of basic apparatuses of state administration, like up-to-date government databases. To face the crisis, we needed a society that gave far greater priority to care. Loud calls issued from unlikely places for a “new social contract” that would properly value essential workers and take account of the risks generated by the globalised lifestyles enjoyed by the most fortunate.

It fell to governments mainly of the centre and the right to meet the crisis. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the US experimented with denial. In Mexico, the notionally leftwing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through.

It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the US, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the “populists”.

To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses – whether in the form of the EU’s Next Generation programme or Biden’s Build Back Better programme in 2020 – it came from the repertoire of green modernisation, sustainable development and the Green New Deal.

German chancellor Angela Merkel with South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa in Pretoria in early 2020. 

Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy

The result was a bitter historic irony. Even as the advocates of the Green New Deal, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, had gone down to political defeat, 2020 resoundingly confirmed the realism of their diagnosis. It was the Green New Deal that had squarely addressed the urgency of environmental challenges and linked it to questions of extreme social inequality. It was the Green New Deal that had insisted that in meeting these challenges, democracies could not allow themselves to be hamstrung by conservative economic doctrines inherited from the bygone battles of the 70s and discredited by the financial crisis of 2008. It was the Green New Deal that had mobilised engaged young citizens on whom democracy, if it was to have a hopeful future, clearly depended.

The Green New Deal had also, of course, demanded that rather than endlessly patching a system that produced and reproduced inequality, instability and crisis, it should be radically reformed. That was challenging for centrists. But one of the attractions of a crisis was that questions of the long-term future could be set aside. The year 2020 was all about survival.

The immediate economic policy response to the coronavirus shock drew directly on the lessons of 2008. Government spending and tax cuts to support the economy were even more prompt. Central bank interventions were even more spectacular. These fiscal and monetary policies together confirmed the essential insights of economic doctrines once advocated by radical Keynesians and made newly fashionable by doctrines such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). State finances are not limited like those of a household. If a monetary sovereign treats the question of how to organise financing as anything more than a technical matter, that is itself a political choice. As John Maynard Keynes once reminded his readers in the midst of the second world war: “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” The real challenge, the truly political question, was to agree what we wanted to do and to figure out how to do it.

Experiments in economic policy in 2020 were not confined to the rich countries. Enabled by the abundance of dollars unleashed by the Fed, but drawing on decades of experience with fluctuating global capital flows, many emerging market governments, in Indonesia and Brazil for instance, displayed remarkable initiative in response to the crisis. They put to work a toolkit of policies that enabled them to hedge the risks of global financial integration. Ironically, unlike in 2008, China’s greater success in virus control left its economic policy looking relatively conservative. Countries such as Mexico and India, where the pandemic spread rapidly but governments failed to respond with large-scale economic policy, looked increasingly out of step with the times. The year would witness the head-turning spectacle of the IMF scolding a notionally leftwing Mexican government for failing to run a large enough budget deficit.

It was hard to avoid the sense that a turning point had been reached. Was this, finally, the death of the orthodoxy that had prevailed in economic policy since the 80s? Was this the death knell of neoliberalism? As a coherent ideology of government, perhaps. The idea that the natural envelope of economic activity – whether the disease environment or climate conditions – could be ignored or left to markets to regulate was clearly out of touch with reality. So, too, was the idea that markets could self-regulate in relation to all conceivable social and economic shocks. Even more urgently than in 2008, survival dictated interventions on a scale last seen in the second world war.

All this left doctrinaire economists gasping for breath. That in itself is not surprising. The orthodox understanding of economic policy was always unrealistic. In reality, neoliberalism had always been radically pragmatic. Its real history was that of a series of state interventions in the interests of capital accumulation, including the forceful deployment of state violence to bulldoze opposition. Whatever the doctrinal twists and turns, the social realities with which the market revolution had been entwined since the 1970s all endured until 2020. The historic force that finally burst the dykes of the neoliberal order was not radical populism or the revival of class struggle – it was a plague unleashed by heedless global growth and the massive flywheel of financial accumulation.

In 2008, the crisis had been brought on by the overexpansion of the banks and the excesses of mortgage securitisation. In 2020, the coronavirus hit the financial system from the outside, but the fragility that this shock exposed was internally generated. This time it was not banks that were the weak link, but the asset markets themselves. The shock went to the very heart of the system, the market for American Treasuries, the supposedly safe assets on which the entire pyramid of credit is based. If that had melted down, it would have taken the rest of the world with it.

A curfew sign in Miami, Florida, in March 2020. 

Photograph: Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images

The scale of stabilising interventions in 2020 was impressive. It confirmed the basic insistence of the Green New Deal that if the will was there, democratic states did have the tools they needed to exercise control over the economy. This was, however, a double-edged realisation, because if these interventions were an assertion of sovereign power, they were driven by crisis. As in 2008, they served the interests of those who had the most to lose. This time, not just individual banks but entire markets were declared too big to fail. To break that cycle of crisis and stabilising, and to make economic policy into a true exercise in democratic sovereignty, would require root-and-branch reform. That would require a real power shift, and the odds were stacked against that.

The massive economic policy interventions of 2020, like those of 2008, were Janus-faced. On the one hand, their scale exploded the bounds of neoliberal restraint and their economic logic confirmed the basic diagnosis of interventionist macroeconomics back to Keynes. When an economy was spiralling into recession, one did not have to accept the disaster as a natural cure, an invigorating purge. Instead, prompt and decisive government economic policy could prevent the collapse and forestall unnecessary unemployment, waste and social suffering.

These interventions could not but appear as harbingers of a new regime beyond neoliberalism. On the other hand, they were made from the top down. They were politically thinkable only because there was no challenge from the left and their urgency was impelled by the need to stabilise the financial system. And they delivered. Over the course of 2020, household net worth in the US increased by more than $15tn. Yet that overwhelmingly benefited the top 1%, who owned almost 40% of all stocks. The top 10%, between them, owned 84%. If this was indeed a “new social contract”, it was an alarmingly one-sided affair.

Nevertheless, 2020 was a moment not just of plunder, but of reformist experimentation. In response to the threat of social crisis, new modes of welfare provision were tried out in Europe, the US and many emerging market economies. And in search of a positive agenda, centrists embraced environmental policy and the issue of the climate crisis as never before. Contrary to the fear that Covid-19 would distract from other priorities, the political economy of the Green New Deal went mainstream. “Green Growth”, “Build Back Better”, “Green Deal” – the slogans varied, but they all expressed green modernisation as the common centrist response to the crisis.

Seeing 2020 as a comprehensive crisis of the neoliberal era – with regard to its environmental, social, economic and political underpinnings – helps us find our historical bearings. Seen in those terms, the coronavirus crisis marks the end of an arc whose origin is to be found in the 70s. It might also be seen as the first comprehensive crisis of the age of the Anthropocene – an era defined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature.

The year 2020 exposed how dependent economic activity was on the stability of the natural environment. A tiny virus mutation in a microbe could threaten the entire world’s economy. It also exposed how, in extremis, the entire monetary and financial system could be directed toward supporting markets and livelihoods. This forced the question of who was supported and how – which workers, which businesses would receive what benefits or which tax break? These developments tore down partitions that had been fundamental to the political economy of the last half-century – lines that divided the economy from nature, economics from social policy and from politics per se. On top of that, there was another major shift, which in 2020 finally dissolved the underlying assumptions of the era of neoliberalism: the rise of China.

When in 2005 Tony Blair scoffed at critics of globalisation, it was their fears that he mocked. He contrasted their parochial anxieties to the modernising energy of Asian nations, for which globalisation offered a bright horizon. The global security threats that Blair recognised, such as Islamic terrorism, were nasty. But they had no hope of actually changing the status quo. Therein lay their suicidal, otherworldly irrationality. In the decade after 2008, it was that confidence in the robustness of the status quo that was lost.

Russia was the first to expose the fact that global economic growth might shift the balance of power. Fuelled by exports of oil and gas, Moscow re-emerged as a challenge to US hegemony. Putin’s threat, however, was limited. China’s was not. In December 2017, the US issued its new National Security Strategy, which for the first time designated the Indo-Pacific as the decisive arena of great power competition. In March 2019, the EU issued a strategy document to the same effect. The UK, meanwhile, performed an extraordinary about-face, from celebrating a new “golden era” of Sino-UK relations in 2015 to deploying an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea.

Joe Biden in July 2020 during his presidential campaign.

 Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

The military logic was familiar. All great powers are rivals, or at least so goes the logic of “realist” thinking. In the case of China, there was the added factor of ideology. In 2021, the CCP did something its Soviet counterpart never got to do: it celebrated its centenary. While since the 80s it had permitted market-driven growth and private capital accumulation, Beijing made no secret of its adherence to an ideological heritage that ran by way of Marx and Engels to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Xi Jinping could hardly have been more emphatic about the need to cleave to this tradition, and no clearer in his condemnation of Mikhail Gorbachev for losing hold of the Soviet Union’s ideological compass. So the “new” cold war was really the “old” cold war revived, the cold war in Asia, the one that the west had in fact never won.

There were, however, two major differences dividing the past from the present. The first was the economy. China posed a threat as a result of the greatest economic boom in history. That had hurt some workers in the west in manufacturing, but businesses and consumers across the western world and beyond had profited immensely from China’s development, and stood to profit even more in future. That created a quandary. A revived cold war with China made sense from every vantage point except “the economy, stupid”.

The second fundamental novelty was the global environmental problem, and the role of economic growth in accelerating it. When global climate politics first emerged in its modern form in the 90s, the US was the largest and most recalcitrant polluter. China was poor and its emissions barely figured in the global balance. By 2020, China emitted more carbon dioxide than the US and Europe put together, and the gap was poised to widen at least for another decade. You could no more envision a solution to the climate problem without China than you could imagine a response to the risk of emerging infectious diseases. China was the most powerful incubator of both.

In 2020, the green modernisers of the EU were still trying to resolve this double dilemma in their strategic documents by defining China all at the same time as a systemic rival, a strategic competitor and a partner in dealing with the climate crisis. The Trump administration made life easier for itself by denying the climate problem. But Washington, too, was impaled on the horns of the economic dilemma – between ideological denunciation of Beijing, strategic calculation, long-term corporate investments in China and the president’s desire to strike a quick deal. This was an unstable combination, and in 2020 it tipped. China was redefined as a threat to the US, strategically and economically. In reaction, the intelligence, security and judicial branches of the American government declared economic war on China. By closing markets and blocking the export of microchips and the equipment to make microchips, they set out to sabotage the development of China’s hi-tech sector, the heart of any modern economy.

It was to a degree accidental that this escalation took place when it did. China’s rise was a long-term world historic shift. But Beijing’s success in handling the coronavirus and the assertiveness that it unleashed were a red flag to the Trump administration. Meanwhile, it was growing increasingly clear that the US’s continued global strength in finance, tech and military power rested on domestic feet of clay. As Covid-19 painfully exposed, the US health system was ramshackle and its domestic social safety net left tens of millions at risk of poverty. If Xi’s “China dream” came through 2020 intact, the same cannot be said for its American counterpart.

The general crisis of neoliberalism in 2020 thus had a specific and traumatic significance for the US – and for one part of the American political spectrum in particular. The Republican party and its nationalist and conservative constituencies suffered in 2020 what can best be described as an existential crisis, with profoundly damaging consequences for the American government, for the American constitution and for America’s relations with the wider world. This culminated in the extraordinary period between 3 November 2020 and 6 January 2021, in which Trump refused to concede electoral defeat, a large part of the Republican party actively supported an effort to overturn the election, the social crisis and the pandemic were left unattended to, and finally, on 6 January, the president and other leading figures in his party encouraged a mob invasion of the Capitol.

For good reason, this raises deep concerns about the future of American democracy. And there are elements on the far right of American politics that can fairly be described as fascistoid. But two basic elements were missing from the original fascist equation in the US in 2020. One is total war. Americans remember the civil war and imagine future civil wars to come. They have recently engaged in expeditionary wars that have blown back on American society in militarised policing and paramilitary fantasies. But total war reconfigures society in quite a different way. It constitutes a mass body, not the individualised commandos of 2020.

The other missing ingredient in the classic fascist equation is social antagonism – a threat from the left, whether imagined or real, to the social and economic status quo. As the constitutional storm clouds gathered in 2020, American business aligned massively and squarely against Trump. Nor were the major voices of corporate America afraid to spell out the business case for doing so, including shareholder value, the problems of running companies with politically divided workforces, the economic importance of the rule of law and, astonishingly, the losses in sales to be expected in the event of a civil war.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigning in 2019. 

Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

This alignment of money with democracy in the US in 2020 should be reassuring, but only up to a point. Consider for a second an alternative scenario. What if the virus had arrived in the US a few weeks sooner, the spreading pandemic had rallied mass support for Bernie Sanders and his call for universal health care, and the Democratic primaries had swept an avowed socialist to the head of the ticket rather than Joe Biden? It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the full weight of American business was thrown the other way, for all the same reasons, backing Trump in order to ensure that Sanders was not elected. And what if Sanders had in fact won a majority? Then we would have had a true test of the American constitution and the loyalty of the most powerful social interests to it. The fact that we have to contemplate such scenarios is indicative of the extremity of the polycrisis of 2020.

The election of Joe Biden and the fact that his inauguration took place at the appointed time on 21 January 2021 restored a sense of calm. But when Biden boldly declares that “America is back”, it has become increasingly clear that the next question we need to ask is: which America? And back to what? The comprehensive crisis of neoliberalism may have unleashed creative intellectual energy even at the once-dead centre of politics. But an intellectual crisis does not a new era make. If it is energising to discover that we can afford anything we can actually do, it also puts us on the spot. What can and should we actually do? Who, in fact, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil demonstrate, democratic politics is taking on strange and unfamiliar new forms. Social inequalities are more, not less extreme. At least in the rich countries, there is no collective countervailing force. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply risks. The principal use to which our newfound financial freedom has been put are more and more grotesque efforts at financial stabilisation. The antagonism between the west and China divides huge chunks of the world, as not since the cold war. And now, in the form of Covid, the monster has arrived. The Anthropocene has shown its fangs – on an as yet modest scale. Covid is far from being the worst of what we should expect – 2020 was not the full alert. If we are dusting ourselves off and enjoying the recovery, we should reflect. Around the world the dead are unnumbered, but our best guess puts the figure at 10 million. Thousands are dying every day. And 2020 was a wake-up call.

Adapted from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze, published by Allen Lane on 7 September.