UK parents threatened with fines, jail for refusing to send children into unsafe classrooms

Julie Hyland

Within days of schools reopening in England, cases of COVID-19 are rising exponentially, and deaths along with them. But still the Conservative government and local authorities—many Labour Party-run—continue to insist that schools are safe, and parents who reject the lie and refuse to send their children into COVID infected classrooms are faced with threats of fines and imprisonment.

In the week to September 8, 272,334 people tested positive and 6,748 were admitted to hospital—a daily average of 863. Over 130 people were killed by the virus each day on average, 932 in total. Case rates are highest among those aged 0-19, especially in the 10-19 age group, 43,166 of whom tested positive in the last week.

Primary school pupils return to a school in Bournemouth, England on Monday September 6, 2021 (WSWS Media)

In Scotland, where schools opened on August 11, cases doubled by the end of the month. Children account for almost 40 percent of the new cases, 2,729 out of the 6,836 recorded on Thursday. On Wednesday, Dingwall Academy, one of the largest secondary schools in the Scottish Highlands, was forced to shut due to a “significant number” of COVID cases and the “high number of staff having to self-isolate.”

The rest of the UK is following the same path as the ruling elite, and all the official parties, prioritise profits over lives.

In Wales, Dr David Hepburn, Intensive Care consultant at the Grange University Hospital in Cwmbran, tweeted that his Intensive Therapy Unit was “now over 50 percent of our capacity with COVID patients” and that patients “are also younger this time around”.

In Northern Ireland, the Ulster Teachers’ Union said schools are “on the verge of collapse under the strain of COVID-19”, as a further 3,500 children tested positive in the last week. General Secretary Jacquie White said rising “transmission rates, changes in guidance, as well as the lack of support and availability of tests is causing [schools] to be overwhelmed.”

But the union, like education unions across the UK, refuses to call any action to protect its members and those they teach. Instead, White appealed to the government and Education Department—which are enforcing herd immunity—to work “along with the teaching unions and… come up with solutions that will both make the situation manageable for teachers and keep children in schools.”

Deaths among children from COVID-19 are still, thankfully, proportionally low, although exact numbers are hard to quantify as the media parrot the official lie that children are at virtually no risk. This week another child reportedly died, bringing the estimated number of child deaths to 80. There have been 8,842 children admitted to hospital for COVID in the 299 days to September 9, and the numbers are rising daily.

As COVID-19 is allowed to run rampant, enabling new variants to develop, these numbers will tragically rise, as seen in the US. Democratic Party President Joe Biden has doubled down on school reopenings even as 250,000 child coronavirus cases were reported in a week, with 30,000 children hospitalised in just one month.

The supposed “resilience” of children to the virus also conceals the debilitating impact of Long COVID (which affects one in seven COVID infected children), and that high transmission rates among children present a life-threatening danger to teaching staff, family members and the community more generally.

With good cause, a poll by Ipsos MORI shows a large majority of parents—70 percent—are concerned by the risk of COVID-19 infection of their children at school, despite the disinformation campaign.

Nonetheless, most are forced to run the risk of sending their children to school or else lose their jobs, while local authorities, who are imposing government policy, seek to make examples of those who refuse.

One of those targeted is Lisa Diaz, a parent and leading member of the SafeEdForAll (Safe Education For All) campaign group. Within days of schools reopening this month in England, Diaz, who has a genetic blood disorder and has been forced to keep her two children—aged 11 and eight—out of school, received a letter from her daughter’s primary threatening sanctions.

She told the World Socialist Web Site, “On day two of the schools reopening [Tuesday September 7] a generic letter was sent from Woodfield school, saying that attendance is mandatory and send your child in or face fines and prosecution. The next day, I received another letter from Wigan LA [local authority] repeating that attendance is mandatory and the risk to children is ‘very low’. On Thursday, there was another letter stating that a positive COVID case had been confirmed in my daughter’s primary school. But I’m supposed to send her in!” Another case was confirmed on Friday.

Lisa posted a video on Twitter—viewed over 43,000 times—in which she responded to the threats, citing world-renowned scientists on the dangers of COVID to children. She stated that she was “fed up and bored being lied to”, told that COVID is benign, “absolutely fine” and everyone “can get it”. “It isn’t fine, and we should be doing everything we can to protect them so enough of the gaslighting. I’m absolutely sick of it.”

Lisa Diaz speaking on the video in which she responded to the threats from Labour Party-run Wigan local authority, citing world renowned scientists on the dangers of COVID to children. (Credit: Liza Diaz @Sandyboots2020)

Lisa said the video was “then retweeted and endorsed by Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, leading epidemiologist and Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC. He retweeted it because the claims are a lie. One in seven children get Long COVID and suffer symptoms 15 weeks later. The latest figures are that in Scotland, one in 50 children will be hospitalised through COVID. That cannot be described as a ‘very low risk’.

“Then, just three days into the school reopening, there was a COVID positive case in primary year two and the school is just advising pupils with symptoms to get a test. There’s no mandatory isolation, the ‘bubbles’ are not shut. It’s just laughable. COVID is in school, and they are saying you have to send your children in.”

She told the WSWS that, in contrast to her son’s school, Woodfield have “never provided any work for my daughter for the duration of the pandemic. Not one lesson.

“I don’t care what they put in the little book as the reason for absence so long as they don’t threaten me with fines and prosecution. I want my children in school, but it’s just got to be safe. Not at this moment in time.

Lisa Diaz with both of her children

“It looks like Wigan LA want to make an example of me but I’m completely resolute. If they’re that stupid to take me to court, I will go to every news outlet in the country and make a big show of it.

“Schools can authorise absences or choose to bully parents. I’m not having people telling me its fine for children to catch COVID. I’m not having people telling me that classrooms are safe because they’re lies. I know children already learning at home when schools reopened because they’ve got COVID and they have not even been reopened a week.

“Wigan is Labour-run. I’ve got in writing from Lisa Nandy [Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary and Wigan MP] and Kate Green [the party’s Shadow Education Secretary] that the Labour Party is ‘firmly’ against punitive measures in the pandemic against parents like myself. But their council is doing that. Official Labour policy is not to fine parents but they’re doing it anyway.”

Schools forced to close across Russia as COVID-19 spreads

Andrea Peters

About a week after the start of the school year on September 1, dozens of areas in Russia are reporting the closure of classrooms at all levels of the educational system—from daycare to colleges—due to outbreaks and exposures impacting thousands of children, young people, and educators. Russia’s families are now confronting a COVID-19 crisis, with a situation developing akin to that seen in the US over the last several weeks.

In Saratov, 21 schools, 20 kindergartens, three vocational high schools, and several institutes had to send hundreds of students and dozens of faculty into quarantine. In Vologodsky, 27 schools had to shutter 34 classes. In Volgograd, children in 28 classrooms moved to online learning this week. In Altai, where automatic closures are triggered when more than 20 percent of teachers are sick, 20 institutions shut 30 school rooms. Other regions forced to take similar measures include, but are not limited to, Adygea, Chelyabinsk, Kemerov, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Nizhegorodsky, Krasnodar, South Ossetia, Kuzbass, and the country’s second-largest metropolitan area, Saint Petersburg.

That city is also now recording 10-15 child hospitalizations a day, two to three times what was witnessed in January, as part of a rapid rise in severely ill patients over the last several days. This comes on top of an already worsening situation for the young. It took Saint Petersburg just three months this past summer to see the same number of hospitalizations in the under-18 population as it did from March to September of last year.

The federal government in Russia does not regularly publish official statistics on coronavirus infections among children, forcing analysts to turn to information released by local health agencies to get a portrait of the situation. The Russian national media barely reports on the unfolding catastrophe.

Just before schools reopened on September 1, the Russian Health Ministry revealed that half a million school children—out of a total number of almost 7 million official cases—had already been infected with the virus in the previous year and a half. Infections among newly born children have climbed 26 times in comparison to the winter, according to Moscow-based pediatrician Evgeny Timakov. He added that, “if adults fall ill in a family, in 80 to 90 percent of cases the children will fall ill too.”

As of early to mid-August—that is, even before schools opened their doors —the Sakha Republic reported seeing a 30 percent rise in cases among kids, the region of Saratov registered a 57 percent uptick in those under 6 with the virus, and local doctors in Altai, Kamchatka, and Bashkortostan said they were seeing more sick children.

Now, Russia is confronting a new surge bound up with the spread of the Delta variant and the reopening of schools.

In Kazan, in a single day this past week, the city reported 500 cases of children with respiratory infections. In Kuzbass, an increase in child coronavirus cases has tipped the region into the “red zone” and led to an extension of the hours of pediatric clinics and increase in emergency services. This comes on top of a population-wide surge in COVID-19 infections in Russia this summer, which, while declining somewhat, still remains well above previous lows with daily cases averaging around 18,000 over the last week.

While government officials seek to publicly downplay the danger of a “fourth wave,” it is clear that it has already begun, and they were well aware of what would happen as millions of school children streamed back into classrooms. The newspaper Nezavismaya Gazeta reported that the Ministries of Education and Science and Higher Education have been anticipating widespread transitions to online learning as COVID-19 makes its way through the schools.

Experts state that massive investments in air filtration systems are necessary to arrest the progress of the disease, but so far, all that schools have managed to introduce, if anything, are anti-germicidal UV systems, the purchase of which is financed out of local budgets and in some cases, parent committees. These efforts, along with other limited mitigation measures such as masking, social distancing, temperature checks, surface cleaning and, in some schools, vaccine mandates for staff, cannot transform Russia’s dilapidated schools into safe spaces.

As government officials and the media have done around the world, Russian leaders and major media outlets have long promoted the view that children tend to not get COVID-19 and, should they be infected, not become severely ill. This is untrue. Pediatricians in Tomsk recently reported that 40 percent of their COVID-19 patients have had to consult a cardiologist, 19 percent an allergy-immune specialist, and 10 percent a rheumatologist after infection. In Altai, the head physician at a children’s polyclinic, noted that doctors are having to treat infants who have recovered from COVID-19 for urinary tract complications that are long-term.

Child deaths from coronavirus, data about which the government does not release, will rise in the coming weeks and months, mirroring what is happening in countries like the United States and the UK.

There have been just two COVID-19-related deaths among the under-18 population reported recently in the country, including a two-month-old baby in Tula and a 12-year old in Novosibirsk, although in the latter case the local Ministry of Health insisted that the real cause was an underlying genetic disease.

Daily coronavirus deaths in Russia, which have between 750 and 800 since mid-July, show no signs of abating, despite a small drop in the number of cases. It is also widely known that these numbers are a gross underestimate, as officials routinely attribute COVID-19 deaths to other causes, should a patient have any other co-morbidity. Estimates indicate that the real death toll may be up to five times higher than the officially acknowledged 187,000 deaths. The mortality rate from COVID-19 has been climbing upward throughout this year, and July has been the deadliest month in the pandemic for Russia so far with over 50,000 deaths from the coronavirus.

Greek government appoints right-wing extremist Athanasios Plevris as health minister

Katerina Selin

After the devastating forest fires in July and August, Greece is now heading into the next wave of the pandemic with sharply rising COVID-19 infections and a low vaccination rate. On August 24, authorities registered a record 4,608 COVID cases. On September 2, 106 people died from the virus—the third highest figure since the pandemic began. In the small country of around 11 million inhabitants, more than 14,000 people have already died from COVID-19.

There is growing concern and anger in the population about the lack of resources in the health system and the dangerous “herd immunity” strategy of the government. The reopening of schools next week in particular will fuel the spread of the Delta variant and put thousands of children, young people and their families at risk. At the same time, only about 56 percent of the population is currently fully vaccinated.

The Greek government under the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party is reacting to the social tensions escalated by the pandemic with a further shift to the right and is bracing itself for a confrontation with the working class. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis therefore reshuffled his cabinet last week and gave positions to radical right-wing forces.

Newly appointed ministers are sworn in at the Athens presidential palace after Greece’s cabinet reshuffle, Aug. 31, 2021 (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

The new health minister is Athanasios (Thanos) Plevris, a lawyer and the son of Greece’s most influential fascist and Nazi Konstantinos Plevris. Until his defection to ND in 2012, Thanos Plevris was an MP for the far-right party LAOS (People’s Orthodox Alarm). This means that three ministries are now in the hands of former LAOS politicians: Health under Plevris, Interior under Makis Voridis and Development under Adonis Georgiadis. All three are notorious right-wing extremists known for their xenophobic rants.

LAOS founder Giorgos Karatzaferis, himself a racist and anti-Semite, commented on the cabinet reshuffle over the weekend on his own television station, Art TV, with evident satisfaction. “Half of my faction is currently running the country,” said Karatzaferis, who sees this as a concession to right-wing opponents of vaccination. “Thanos Plevris was my protégé,” he stressed. When Plevris’s father’s Nazi propaganda was too much in the public spotlight, the son was promoted instead and first entered parliament in 2007.

Although Thanos Plevris has been trying to distance himself from his father in words for a long time, a closer look at his political background proves what kind of politics he has.

The father, Konstantinos Plevris, is considered the ideological pioneer of the neo-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn). During the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, Plevris worked closely with the junta and is also said to have been on the payroll of several secret services, including the CIA. Already in 1965, he founded the “Fourth of August Party”, whose name goes back to the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1941) who bloodily suppressed the workers’ movement in the interwar period. Plevris senior is not the only one in this tradition. His son, too, has reportedly referred positively to Metaxas on several occasions, calling him a “comrade” and a “leader”.

Konstantinos Plevris in October 2020 as the lawyer of right-wing extremist and MEP Ioannis Lagos, who was convicted as ex-member of Chrysi Avgi (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

In 2006, Plevris senior published the anti-Semitic book “Jews, the Whole Truth”, in which he promoted the Holocaust and bluntly declared that he despises the Jews and regards them as “subhumans”, as the German online magazine Telepolis reported . This book was promoted on television by the current Development Minister Georgiadis. When K. Plevris was sentenced to 14 months in prison on probation for “incitement of the people and racial hatred” in December 2007, he appealed and was defended in court by his son Thanos in the following trial—and won. In 2009, the old Plevris was acquitted, which his son praised as proof of “freedom of expression in Greece”.

In a statement on September 1, the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece expressed concern about the appointment of Thanos Plevris, recalling how he explained to the court in 2009, as a defense lawyer, why it was perfectly legal for his father to want to exterminate other people. Commenting on K. Plevris’s reference to Auschwitz, he said: “I will examine the most extreme interpretation. That the defendant with this reference means: ‘Keep the camp of Auschwitz in good conditions because I want, at some point, the national socialist regime to come back, Hitler to come back, take the Jews and put them in Auschwitz.’ What kind of instigation is this? What incitement is this? Is it that one is not allowed to believe and want to believe that ‘I want to exterminate someone’?”

Plevris responded to the accusations of the Central Board by apologizing to the Jewish population and speaking out “against any form of anti-Semitism”. But such worthless phrases are only meant to cover up his extreme right-wing views.

As early as the 1990s, Plevris marched with the neo-Nazis. He is on friendly terms with the former spokesman of Chrysi Avgi, Ilias Kasidiaris, as this photo proves.

Thanos Plevris (left) with neo-Nazi Ilias Kasidiaris (Twitter / @AntilianKotzai)

In 2020, the trial began for the murder of an LGBT activist who was beaten to death in Athens two years ago. The defendant’s legal counsel is Thanos Plevris, according to a Deutsche Welle report.

In 2010, Plevris appeared with Georgiadis before the extreme right-wing “Patriotic Association of Thermopylae”, where they ranted about the “purity” of the Greek race and the importance of “blood ties”.

Moreover, the new health minister is a vaccine sceptic. When the H1N1 influenza pandemic spread in 2009–10, he encouraged right-wing opponents of vaccination and railed in parliament against doctors calling on citizens to get vaccinated, denouncing them for creating “panic”. This July, he spoke out against the government persuading people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Particularly shocking are his inhumane statements from 2011, when he called for the killing of refugees at an event hosted by the right-wing Patria magazine. “There is no border protection without deaths,” Thanos Plevris declared to the applause of his fascist followers.

He threatened immigrants, “When you’re here, there will be no social benefits, you won’t get anything to eat or drink, you won’t be able to go to the hospital, and you’ll be telling others in Pakistan, ‘We’re worse off here.’” Migration to Greece should be deterred, he stressed. “Hell must look like heaven to what they will live here!”

It is not just Plevris’s ilk in Europe like Hungarian prime minister Orban or German politicians of the AfD who have made similar diatribes. In recent years the entire ruling class in Greece and the EU has followed precisely this path, terrorizing refugees with gunfire at the border, ‘pushbacks’ in the Mediterranean and hellish living conditions in detention camps.

The strengthening of fascist elements in the Greek government must be understood as an open declaration of war on the working class. The new extreme right-wing health minister will relentlessly impose reopening policies and cuts in the health system under the conditions of the new Delta wave.

Mitsotakis has made other changes in his cabinet. Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, discredited for his fatal inaction during the recent wildfires, has been replaced by Panagiotis Theodorikakos, who is also in charge of the police and fire brigade.

Theodorikakos has had a long march to the right—from the youth organization of the Communist Party of Greece to the social democratic PASOK to the ND. His history means he is seen as a suitable man for suppressing social protests. A few days after taking office, he applied for the first time the new law restricting demonstrations that was passed last year. A demonstration of around 200 students in the centre of Athens was pushed to one side of the street by the police last Friday so that car traffic could continue as normal.

The government also set up a new ministry for the climate crisis and civil protection to deflect popular anger over the consequences of this year’s forest fires. Mitsotakis first appointed Evangelos Apostolakis, a former navy general and defence minister in the Syriza government, to the post, with the aim of integrating the opposition party. He declined, and the job was given to Cypriot right-wing conservative politician Christos Stylianidis, previously EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Protection from 2014 to 2019.

The current right-wing shift in Greece is part of an international process. Everywhere, the ruling class is turning to dictatorial forms of rule and relying on far-right forces to suppress the growing opposition among workers and youth.

The year began with the storming of the US Congress by a fascist mob instigated by former President Donald Trump. In Germany, the bourgeois parties’ candidates for the Bundestag are vying to see who can most aggressively push a militarist agenda and implement school openings most ruthlessly. In all EU countries, the public health system is in danger of collapsing due to the spread of the Delta variant as governments let the virus run rampant, removing all protective measures except vaccinations. A year and a half into the pandemic and after more than a million deaths in Europe, the ruling elites continue to pursue the same agenda: “profits before lives”.

That is why there was no outcry in the international media about the fact that a politician in the mould of German fascist Bjorn Höcke now heads the Greek Ministry of Health. Major newspapers like Spiegel Online, the New York Times and the Guardian have remained silent, as have most EU politicians and international pseudo-leftist parties.

The largest opposition party, Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), feigned verbal criticism of the cabinet reshuffle. Party leader Alexis Tsipras spoke of an extreme right-wing “government of LAOS ministers” and Syriza MP Euclid Tsakalotos quoted Plevris’s anti-refugee rants in parliament. “A man who made this statement and thinks like this cannot be a health minister in any European country,” Tsakalotos said.

But he then immediately offered to accept Plevris if he distanced himself from the statements: “In our view, there are only two options: either he retracts his statements now, before the inauguration, or Mr Mitsotakis revises his decision.”

In fact, Syriza itself is part of the right-wing turn in Greek and international politics and directly responsible for the rise of far-right forces to the highest government offices. During its 2015–2019 term in government, it formed a coalition with the ultra-right Independent Greeks (Anel) to impose the austerity dictates of the Troika of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission in the face of enormous popular opposition. In the process it also armed the police state apparatus and the military, and pursued a brutal refugee policy in the spirit of Plevris.

Rwanda’s Military is the French Proxy on African Soil

Vijay Prashad

On July 9, 2021, the government of Rwanda said that it had deployed 1,000 troops to Mozambique to battle al-Shabaab fighters, who had seized the northern province of Cabo Delgado. A month later, on August 8, Rwandan troops captured the port city of Mocímboa da Praia, where just off the coast sits a massive natural gas concession held by the French energy company TotalEnergies SE and the U.S. energy company ExxonMobil. These new developments in the region led to the African Development Bank’s President M. Akinwumi Adesina announcing on August 27 that TotalEnergies SE will restart the Cabo Delgado liquefied natural gas project by the end of 2022.

Militants from al-Shabaab (or ISIS-Mozambique, as the U.S. State Department prefers to call it) did not fight to the last man; they disappeared across the border into Tanzania or into their villages in the hinterland. The energy companies will, meanwhile, soon start to recoup their investments and profit handsomely, thanks in large part to the Rwandan military intervention.

Why did Rwanda intervene in Mozambique in July 2021 to defend, essentially, two major energy companies? The answer lies in a very peculiar set of events that took place in the months before the troops left Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.

Billions Stuck Underwater

Al-Shabaab fighters first made their appearance in Cabo Delgado in October 2017. For three years, the group played a cat-and-mouse game with Mozambique’s army before taking control of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020. At no point did it seem possible for Mozambique’s army to thwart al-Shabaab and allow TotalEnergies SE and ExxonMobil to restart operations in the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of northern Mozambique, where a massive natural gas field was discovered in February 2010.

The Mozambican Ministry of Interior had hired a range of mercenaries such as Dyck Advisory Group (South Africa), Frontier Services Group (Hong Kong), and the Wagner Group (Russia). In late August 2020, TotalEnergies SE and the government of Mozambique signed an agreement to create a joint security force to defend the company’s investments against al-Shabaab. None of these armed groups succeeded. The investments were stuck underwater.

At this point, Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi indicated, as I was told by a source in Maputo, that TotalEnergies SE might ask the French government to send a detachment to assist in securing the area. This discussion went on into 2021. On January 18, 2021, French Defense Minister Florence Parly and her counterpart in Portugal, João Gomes Cravinho, talked on the phone, during which—it is suggested in Maputo—they discussed the possibility of a Western intervention in Cabo Delgado. On that day, TotalEnergies SE CEO Patrick Pouyanné met with President Nyusi and his ministers of defense (Jaime Bessa Neto) and interior (Amade Miquidade) to discuss the joint “action plan to strengthen the security of the area.” Nothing came of it. The French government was not interested in a direct intervention.

A senior official in Maputo told me that it is strongly believed in Mozambique that French President Emmanuel Macron suggested the Rwandan force, rather than French forces, be deployed to secure Cabo Delgado. Indeed, Rwanda’s armies—highly trained, well-armed by the Western countries, and given impunity to act outside the bounds of international law—have proved their mettle in the interventions carried out in South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

What Kagame Got for the Intervention

Paul Kagame has ruled Rwanda since 1994, first as vice president and minister of defense and then since 2000 as the president. Under Kagame, democratic norms have been flouted within Rwanda, while Rwandan troops have operated ruthlessly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A 2010 UN Mapping Project report on serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed that the Rwandan troops killed “hundreds of thousands if not millions” of Congolese civilians and Rwandan refugees between 1993 and 2003. Kagame rejected the UN report, suggesting that this “double genocide” theory denied the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He has wanted the French to accept responsibility for the genocide of 1994 and has hoped that the international community will ignore the massacres in the eastern Congo.

On March 26, 2021, historian Vincent Duclert submitted a 992-page report on France’s role in the Rwandan genocide. The report makes it clear that France should accept—as Médecins Sans Frontières put it—“overwhelming responsibility” for the genocide. But the report does not say that the French state was complicit in the violence. Duclert traveled to Kigali on April 9 to deliver the report in person to Kagame, who said that the report’s publication “marks an important step toward a common understanding of what took place.”

On April 19, the Rwandan government released a report that it had commissioned from the U.S. law firm Levy Firestone Muse. This report’s title says it all: “A Foreseeable Genocide: The Role of the French Government in Connection with the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda.” The French did not deny the strong words in this document, which argues that France armed the génocidaires and then hastened to protect them from international scrutiny. Macron, who has been loath to accept France’s brutality in the Algerian liberation war, did not dispute Kagame’s version of history. This was a price he was willing to pay.

What France Wants

On April 28, 2021, Mozambique’s President Nyusi visited Kagame in Rwanda. Nyusi told Mozambique’s news broadcasters that he had come to learn about Rwanda’s interventions in the Central African Republic and to ascertain Rwanda’s willingness to assist Mozambique in Cabo Delgado.

On May 18, Macron hosted a summit in Paris, “seeking to boost financing in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” which was attended by several heads of government, including Kagame and Nyusi, the president of the African Union (Moussa Faki Mahamat), the president of the African Development Bank (Akinwumi Adesina), the president of the West African Development Bank (Serge Ekué), and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (Kristalina Georgieva). Exit from “financial asphyxiation” was at the top of the agenda, although in private meetings there were discussions about Rwandan intervention in Mozambique.

A week later, Macron left for a visit to Rwanda and South Africa, spending two days (May 26 and 27) in Kigali. He repeated the broad findings of the Duclert report, brought along 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines to Rwanda (where only around 4 percent of the population had received the first dose by the time of his visit), and spent time in private talking to Kagame. On May 28, alongside South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, Macron talked about Mozambique, saying that France was prepared to “take part in operations on the maritime side,” but would otherwise defer to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and to other regional powers. He did not mention Rwanda specifically.

Rwanda entered Mozambique in July, followed by SADC forces, which included South African troops. France got what it wanted: Its energy giant can now recoup its investment.

The Gritty Reality of Solar Power

Priti Gulati Cox & Stan Cox

Time is fast running out. The world’s affluent nations, with their abundant greenhouse emissions, have to finally drag themselves across the starting line and begin phasing out fossil fuels at the accelerated pace that the climate emergency demands. And if they can manage to do that, they clearly will need to quickly build up wind and solar electric capacity to partially compensate for the shrinkage of oil, gas, and coal supplies while addressing the prospect of energy shortages by securing production of essential goods and services for everyone.

Unfortunately, mainstream climate visions have strayed far from confronting the existential necessity to banish fossil fuels. They simply assume that the buildup of renewable energy will automatically chase fossil fuels out of our lives and fully replace them, watt for watt and Btu for Btu. These visions hold out the promise of a world in which a pristine, Sun-powered economy fulfills any and all of our material desires far into the future—a delicious, guilt-free cornucopia. But the green-growth promise is a mirage, and the realities of a high-production, wind- and solar-powered world will be much less tasty.

Any industrial installation, including solar and wind farms, profoundly disrupts the landscape on which it sits. If it were possible to fully satisfy the bloated energy appetites of affluent nation by covering hundreds of millions or billions of acres of the Earth’s surface with power-harvesting hardware, the result would be irreparable ecological damage.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing booms to supply such a sprawling proliferation of solar arrays, wind power plants, battery-backed electric grids, electric-vehicle fleets, and other hardware would require outrageously large inputs of metals such as lithium, cobalt, silver, copper, aluminum, nickel, iron, and a host of exotic rare earth elements.

The global rush to mine these metallic ores is on, and the dire ecological and humanitarian consequences that always follow have spurred growing concern. But the mining and processing of a much more mundane, often overlooked mineral resource—sand—is also critical to renewable-energy expansion and terrible for the Earth and its human and non-human inhabitants.

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The solar-energy industry, like digital electronics, is built on a foundation of silicon. Number 14 in the periodic table of the elements, silicon is abundant in the Earth’s crust. But the industries that mine and process sand, quartzite rock, and other sources of silicon dioxide to obtain pure silicon for use in solar equipment belie the popular, sunny green conception of an alternative-energy economy.

Manufacturing a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells requires very high-quality silicon. Before the rapid growth in solar panel production took off, manufacturers could satisfy their need for the element by recycling flawed computer chips cast off by computer makers. As the solar industry’s demand for silicon exploded, however, they had to start producing their own supplies, by extracting pure silicon from sand and other minerals.

Sand headed for solar uses must go through energy-intensive, and often toxic, processing. It begins with heating sand or quartzite rock, along with a carbon source like wood chips or charcoal, to 3,500 degrees F, resulting in a chemical reaction that produces metallurgical grade silicon. Both the energy for heating and the combustion of the carbon sources contribute to greenhouse warming. Producing one pound of this form of silicon generates an estimate pound and a half of carbon dioxide emissions.

Further refining the metallurgical grade silicon, in order to achieve the 99.9999% purity required in photovoltaic wafers, requires additional heating and chemical treatment. That process produces four tons of the highly toxic compound silicon tetrachloride for every ton of the desired product, polysilicon. And the ultrathin wafers that are sliced from polysilicon blocks for use in photovoltaic cells must be cleaned and smoothed, typically with extremely dangerous hydrofluoric acid.

Sand’s central role in solar energy and its ecological impacts doesn’t end there. The glass sheet that covers and protects a solar panel must have higher transparency than ordinary window glass, to maximize light capture. That requires starting with sand that carries minimal impurities. Most desirable is sand mined from river beds—causing severe disruption of local and downstream ecosystems. Then even the highest quality sand must be deep-cleaned, which involves further energy- and chemical- intensive industrial techniques.

And there’s more to solar energy’s footprint than silicon—for example, the panels’ requirements for large quantities of pure silver and the exploding demand for aluminum frames and supports. In sum, the broad ecological impacts of manufacturing, installing, operating, and, finally dismantling and disposing of a solar installation at the end of its life span include global warming potential (mostly from the silicon processing), ozone depletion, eutrophication of water bodies, and toxicity to humans and non-humans. The lifetime energy consumed is equivalent to a year and a half to three years of the solar farm’s energy output. And photovoltaic panels last only 25 years on average. Their power output declines year by year, and then they have to be replaced—and the cycle of ecological damage begins again.

The chief reason for recent, much-touted decreases in the cost of solar-generated electricity is the increasing share of solar component manufacturing being performed in China, with its low-wage labor force and cheap coal-fired power supply. A whopping 80% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced in China, with 45% in the northwestern province of Xinjiang alone.

Recent news reports show how China’s solar-energy industry is having dire consequences not only for the environment but also for human rights and well-being. In Xinjiang, members of the persecuted Uyghur ethnic minority make up most of the labor force in the hazardous quartz mining and polysilicon manufacturing industries. And most of the Uyghurs are employed through the government’s so-called “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” programs.

A 2021 investigative report from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK concluded, based on strong evidence, that these initiatives “are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment” and are “tantamount to forcible transfer of populations and enslavement.” The researchers found that the supply chains of at least ninety solar energy companies worldwide included polysilicon produced by this forced-labor system.

We must be pragmatic, of course. If the world is going to start leaving oil, gas, and coal in the ground forever, an expansion of wind and solar energy capacity will indeed be necessary. (Some industry insiders turn to a reliable if rusty old saw in advising us that to make a “renewable omelet”, you have to break—and “melt”—some ecological eggs.)

New energy development, however, must be pursued judiciously, minimizing ecological impacts and aiming for a much more modest energy capacity and less industrial production than we have today. Affluent societies worldwide will need to adapt to life with a much smaller and much more equitably shared energy supply; otherwise, we will keep extending our plunder of the Earth, jogging along on the same old ecologically destructive industrial treadmill.

Covid-19 and Right-Wing Business in Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Meg Young

German coronavirus conspiracy theories are available for just €24.99. Germany’s right-wing media are cashing in on the fear of the pandemic. It is good business when selling snake oil and right-wing ideology. At the top is Germany’s right-wing extremist and loosely AfD-affiliated Compact magazine. It is among the clear winners of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Compact marches on undeterred by the fact that Germany’s secret police – Verfassungsschutz – has classified Compact as a case of right-wing extremism. Compact remains a leading publication heavily advocating Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, the AFD, its voters, supporters, and adjacent racist, nationalistic, and chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic causes.

Compact also delivers ideological support and conspiracy fantasies to Germany’s so-called anti-vaxxers, general right-wing natters, tin-foil hat wearing so-called hygiene people, believers in a Jewish world plot, mythical conspiracy advocates, etc. Yet, Compact has turned its ideologically motivated resentment of the government’s current Corona protection regulations into a lucrative business.

In March 2021, Compact published a so-called “special edition” on what Germany’s authoritarian populism calls Merkel’s Corona Dictatorship. Compact’s so-called “report” (sic) starts with a picture of three police officers in protective gear in front of a dystopian disaster scene showing a bombed-out skyscraper.  And, with menacing drones hovering around, the right-wing setup looked like a cheap advertisement for a bad 1970s disaster movie.

Riding the vaccine rejection wave, Compact agitates against vaccinations claiming –falsely– that Angela Merkel was preparing the compulsory vaccination of children. No such plan has ever been discussed or put in place. Yet, it creates fear which is, after all, the key operative ideology of authoritarian populism.

Yet, Compact’s 45,000 monthly subscribers not only subscribe to the magazine, they foremost subscribe to its right-wing ideology. Beyond simple subscriber numbers, German web traffic monitoring website Similarweb, lists Compact’s online version as having about 600,000 visitors per month. To those people, Compact is happy to hype-up distrust in the state’s Covid-19 guidelines. Beyond that, Compact is also offering semi-medical health advice.

Overall, Compact offers the usual conspiratorial ideology claiming, for example, that the coronavirus is actually harmless. Simultaneously, it feeds the hallucination that the pandemic was invented by power-hungry elites to enrich themselves. At the same time, Compact warns against the impending Corona Dictatorship.

Apparently disjointed, the magazine published the following warning on its website, Don’t panic about Corona! Yet, contradictory messages have never deterred any ideology or conspiracy fantasy. It runs under the time-honored maxim, never let the facts and contradictions get in the way of a good ideology.

Compact also tells its readers and believers to improve their immune system offering various food supplements. It recommends, for example, vitamin supplements, antioxidants and the Co-enzyme Q10. Again and again, this is linked to an online shop that offers Nine Lives in an article that is not marked as advertising. There are several hundred such “articles” on the Compact webpage. They suggest to readers that these are written by independent journalists and they are not advertisements.

These so-called articles are published under various authors. Yet, they all promote the same online-shop. Surprisingly, this is not just any online company. The boss of 9-Leben-GmbH or Nine Lives is Kai Homilius. Homilius is also co-founder and shareholder of Compact-Magazin-GmbH – Compact’s owner. In other words, the right-wing magazine advertises an online company of its own shareholder. Owning a magazine and a supposedly independent online shop makes good business and it sells right-wing ideology as a little sideshow.

To con naïve people and fill the pockets of its right-wing owner, Compact advertises Astaxanthin – a vegetable substance for €29.99 ($35). This is where, you get your best protection against Corona and other viruses, the magazine promises. Already in the Spring of 2020, Germany’s Ministry of Food warned against such advertising. The ministry clarified, advertising that sell dubious supplements that suggest to be protective against viruses is prohibited.

Undeterred, Compact plays with people’s fear and cashes in. In addition to Ataxanthin, Compact- magazine is not only a right-wing publisher, it is also in the business of selling dietary supplements. Yet, the link between right-wing ideology, dubious supplements and authoritarian populist publishers reach way further than Compact.

For years, Germany’s right-wing Kopp publishing house has been one of the top dogs. Right-wing publisher and UFO-believer Jochen Kopp publishes books about, well, UFOs, aliens, world conspiracies, alternative medicine, and the myth of an allegedly widespread cover-up hiding the supposed violence of migrants in Germany. Beyond that, Kopp considers scientific medicine a great fraud and a fake.

Kopp’s publishing house features as a double business by not only selling right-wing ideology, but also selling a comprehensive range of supplements on the company’s very own wellness site. You can get 120 capsules of barley grass juice for just €24.99. Of course, there are also crystals and stones and vitalizing waters.

Since decades, Kopp also offers emergency food rations, filters to sanitize drinking water, gas masks, and military style protective gear for €140.00. There are also pepper spray pistols, telescopic batons, and stun guns.

Right-wing Kopp’s press also relies on other authoritarian populist online outlets such as, for example, the extremely conservative Journalistenwatch, which constantly uncovers Germany’s communist-run media. Kopp is also in ideological cahoots with the Deutschland Korier – another the AfD stooge. Like Murdoch, Kopp also loves self-invented mini-celebrities of Germany’s right-wing conspiracy establishment.

Kopp’s advertising machine always welcomes new business like Chlorella algae powder telling its readers, TO PREVENT CANCER (spelled in capitals). In the mix is also former Tagesschau (Germany’s most watch public TV news) presenter and conspiracy fantasist Eva Herman. Herman remains Germany’s most high-ranking conspiracy operative.

She advertises Kopp’s products like a manual on self-treatment with chlorine dioxide. The disinfectant and bleach is used as an alleged miracle cure fighting against HIV, autism, cancer, and of course, Covid-19.

Compact magazine and Kopp are just two of the many companies cashing in on the fear of the Coronavirus pandemic selling supplements, miracle cures, and survival equipment for the expected day X – the end of the world, Dante’s Inferno. Many self-appointed alternative media activists are also on an ideological mission which they finance by selling snake oil. Seemingly unsuspecting companies service conspiracy believers, Christian fundamentals, and people expecting the imminent collapse of society. This is a lucrative business.

Yet, all of this also has real consequences as innocent people turn away from real medicine, refuse vaccinations and increasingly leave society and the democratic discourse. Behind their backs, right-wing profiteers fight on the maxim, fear is a great motivator. Right-wing ideologists and very resourceful and cashed-up businessmen with an ideologically determined entrepreneur spirit have proven the “fear is motivator” maxim.

In the end, Germany’s right-wing not only rides the wave of the Coronavirus pandemic – it also cashes in while simultaneously not just selling snake oil to the innocent. Beyond that, it also converts innocent people to the right-wing cause and away from a democratic society. Through a matching of business, right-wing ideology and the skillful exploitation of Covid-19 fears, Germany’s right-wing continues to undermine democracy.

Johnson government announces “pushback” policy in stepping up of anti-immigration agenda

Robert Stevens

The UK government is stepping up its anti-immigration agenda by rolling out a “pushback policy” to turn away migrant boats attempting to enter the UK via the English Channel.

The Home Office has utilised a spell of good weather, and consequent increase in the number of migrants and asylum seekers seeking to enter the UK, to announce it will intercept and turn around migrants’ small boats from France mid-Channel to prevent them reaching the UK. Around 1,500 migrants arrived on the UK’s shores this week, with the right-wing media dedicating blanket coverage to demands to stop the “flood”.

People thought to be migrants who made the crossing from France are brought into port after being picked up in the Channel by a British border force vessel in Dover, south east England, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

According to the Telegraph, “The Home Secretary has secured legal advice for Border Force vessels to start redirecting migrant boats away from UK waters and back towards France, where the French will have to return them to shore.”

Turning back migrant boats has “already been extensively trialed for months by Border Force at sea,” notes the newspaper, “overseen by the Royal Marines, [and] is due to conclude this month, weather permitting. Sources said that the tactics were ready to deploy as soon as practical and safe.”

Due to the fact that the “refoulement” that Patel proposes is illegal under the international law of the sea, she has commissioned, according to the Telegraph, “robust and detailed” legal advice from Michael Ellis, the Attorney General, and expert QCs”. The Times reported, “She told law officers to rewrite Britain’s interpretation of international maritime law to allow the Border Force to intercept boats as they tried to enter British territorial waters. Officers would then contact the French coastguard to inform it that vessels in French territorial waters were in need of rescue, which would put the legal responsibility for the migrant boats on France.”

According to the Times, the government is proceeding on the basis that “There would be a ‘limited’ legal window to deploy the tactics and only if certain conditions were met. These would include ensuring that the migrant boat in question was not in danger of sinking or capsizing, was not over capacity and was able to return to the French coast.”

No-one should believe that such legal niceties will be adhered to. Given the perilous nature of the Channel crossings, with many migrants often crammed onto small unsafe boats, the policy must result in more deaths.

The Home Office announcement was timed to coincide with a meeting in London Wednesday between Patel and her French counterpart Gérald Darmanin. Patel insisted in “very tense” talks that France had been lax in preventing migrants reaching Britain from its shores and must step up the enforcing of a previously agreed policy of stopping them at the French coastline. It emerged that Britain has even offered to provide the French state a plane to increase its shoreline monitoring.

On Monday, Patel told Tory MPs that she was ready to cut or withdraw the tens of millions of pounds the UK gives to France to prevent migrant crossings. A further £54 million in funding was agreed between London and Paris in July.

Patel said, “We’ve not given them a penny of the money so far and France is going to have to get its act together if it wants to see the cash. It’s payment by results and we’ve not yet seen those results. The money is conditional.” The Times reported that Patel committed to withdrawing funding “if they [France] failed to stop three in four crossings by the end of this month.”

The mood among Tory MPs was, if anything, even more vociferous, with the Guardian reporting that Craig Mackinlay called for the “immediate removal back to France of all who arrive via this illegal route” and for the UK to “disregard diplomatic niceties.” Lee Anderson agreed, declaring, “I said we should drop these illegal immigrants, not migrants, off on a French beach and send the French government a bill for the cost of the journey.”

The following day, Darmanin sent Patel a letter declaring that the existing system could be enforced and boasting that “the rate at which small boat crossings are thwarted stands at 57.3%, i.e. a higher level than that recorded over the same period in 2020.”

He complained that the increase in migrants landing in the UK “is mainly due to a new strategy by people smugglers of using larger boats which can now hold up to 65 people”. While admitting disappointedly, “These groups of migrants are made up of particularly vulnerable people (infants, young children and elderly or disabled people), which limits our means of action,” Darmanin made the sinister accusation that their “behaviour is increasingly violent.”

He “noted the use of military-style detection technology you [Patel] are proposing” and insisted “All available intervention capabilities are permanently mobilized along the Channel coastline”, promising that the number of security personnel on the French Channel coast would be doubled.

Darmanin emphasised that his main concern was stopping migrants getting into France via the Mediterranean in the first place. He wrote, “Migration pressure at our internal borders has never been greater… The mobilization of our forces at our southern borders, as well as at the EU’s borders through the Frontex Agency, must not weaken, when we know the risks of migratory movements which the crises in Afghanistan and Belarus are likely to generate.”

The French minister of the interior made a contemptible effort to cloak this falling out among Gestapo officers in a claimed concern for human rights, declaring, “Safeguarding human lives at sea takes priority over considerations of nationality, status and migratory policy”. He tweeted Thursday, “France will not accept any practice that goes against maritime law, and will not accept any financial blackmail… The UK must hold up its commitment.”

What passes for Britain’s liberal media responded with extraordinary complacency to Patel’s proposals, essentially writing them off as unworkable. This is despite the fact that her Nationality and Border Bill, which is presently going through Parliament, contains, as the Guardian noted, “provisions to set up offshore processing centres and turn suspected migrant boats away from the UK.”

The newspaper cited the comments of Lucy Moreton, a professional officer at the right-wing Immigration Services Union—a splinter union founded to campaign for stricter immigration and border controls. Moreton claimed, “In practical terms, if this happened even once I’d be surprised… There are understandably a lot of constraints around it and you cannot do this with a vessel that is in any way vulnerable and more importantly you need the consent of the French to do it.” Another cited by the Guardian was Conservative MP Tim Loughton, who said, “It sounds good pushing them back but it’s not going to work in practice.”

The fact is that pushback policies are routine at the borders of “Fortress Europe” and internationally. Patel is basing much of her anti-immigration policy on that being enforced by Greece’s conservative New Democracy government, which she visited only last month to learn from its latest brutal measures. Greece has just completed the sealing off its northern border with Turkey with a massive 40km (25-mile) steel fence and new electronic monitoring system.

This is why the Telegraph, among the firmest backers of Patel’s border strengthening policies, could write Thursday, “UK is only following EU's lead on controversial migrant pushback policy”. The government’s “announcement that it will push back migrant boats trying to cross the Channel has striking parallels with tactics used by both Greece and Italy.”

The article cited Felipe González Morales, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, who said recently that Greece has engaged in “the summary and collective expulsion of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers.”

Italy, notes the newspaper, “has essentially adopted pushback by proxy. Along with other EU countries, it gave training, financing and equipment to the Libyan coast guard, which essentially carries out the dirty work of intercepting migrant boats and driving them back to the coast.”