Conspiracy Epidemic, Born In US, Spreads In Europe

Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 17th May, 2021 ) :"It's not a virus, it's a tool to use power," says Monique Lustig in the Netherlands, while in Germany, Hellmuth Mendel argues that "Covid is a story invented by an international financial mafia". "And what if this was all just a film?" asks Christophe Charret in France.

From The Hague to Stuttgart and Paris, they claim to be battling the control of their minds by a ruling class that invented the Covid-19 pandemic for its own ends, seeing themselves as promoting and disseminating alternative views from the official version.

Conspiracy theories, driven by the global health crisis, are taking root in Europe more than ever, drawing inspiration from the QAnon movement in the United States.

Accounts supporting the theories have been purged from Twitter and YouTube after breaking the regulations of the social media giants.

Proponents have taken to other platforms to publish information -- mostly false -- which they claim "mainstream" media are hiding.

AFP reporters spent months looking into this environment of conspiracy theories on the continent, finding everything from adherents of QAnon, ultra-evangelicals and anti-vaxxers, to right-wing populists, the unemployed and even doctors.

They make up a disparate mix of movements and views but their growing power is worrying Western European intelligence services who fear that democracies could be destabilised.

"Conspiracy theories have taken off significantly with social networks. We see now that people are organising themselves in clandestine cells. Obviously it is a threat," said France's national intelligence coordinator Laurent Nunez, acknowledging that QAnon theories have arrived in the country.

European groups affiliated to QAnon or related to the movement are growing on social media.

Some 30,000 subscribers of messaging app Telegram follow the so-called DeQodeurs in France, more than 100,000 follow German conspiracy theory figures Attila Hildmann and Xavier Naidoo, while almost 150,000 follow Briton Charlie Ward, who offers subscribers a near incessant flow of pro-Donald Trump montages.

"There is a cocktail in place," a source in the intelligence community in France told AFP, adding there were grounds for concern over the issue.

The factors include a "weakening of the socio-economic fabric, a strong movement of protesting digital platforms where it is easy to post conspiratorial comment, as well as upcoming elections" in France next spring, said the source, who asked not to be named.

"These movements have more or less existed for the last 10-15 years. They feed on the sense of an anti-system conspiracy," a senior French intelligence official told AFP.

The official said that there was overlap with small ultra-right fringe groups, while emphasising that people involved increasingly come from "quite varied backgrounds".

Involvement can tear apart families, with loved ones unable to stop relatives falling into the groups' grasp.

Forty-eight-year-old bookseller Paul -- not his real name -- told AFP how his mother had slowly drifted away.

"She lived as a recluse, she spent an incredible amount of time online, looking for answers to her rage against the injustices of the world.

"She consumed YouTube 24 hours a day, the conspiracy channels were her only window to the world. The lockdown was the last straw and Covid confirmed all her theories about the end of the world," he said.