Universität Wien

240555 SE MM3 Politics, Pandemics and Reaction (2025S)

Covid, HIV and Some Stereoscopic Temporalities of Conspiracy Thinking

2.50 ECTS (1.00 SWS), SPL 24 - Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
Continuous assessment of course work

Participation at first session is obligatory!

The lecturer can invite students to a grade-relevant discussion about partial achievements. Partial achievements that are obtained by fraud or plagiarized result in the non-evaluation of the course (entry 'X' in certificate). The plagiarism software 'Turnitin' will be used.
The use of AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) for the attainment of partial achievements is only allowed if explicitly requested by the course instructor.
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 25 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Monday 24.03. 11:30 - 14:45 Seminarraum D, NIG 4. Stock
  • Wednesday 26.03. 11:30 - 14:45 Seminarraum D, NIG 4. Stock

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

This course charts the intersection of a couple of trends in reactionary politics, predominantly if not exclusively in the Anglophone world, during a time of great social upset. This is the odd, stereoscopic merging of how the two pandemics anyone 50 or over has experienced in their lifetimes – HIV and Covid – have been symbolically combined in various Reactionary discourses. This merging is not merely confined to “Google researchers” discovering assumed similarities between these two very different viral diseases, but it also extends to how aspects of the historical times of the two plagues – from the political anxieties to some of the music – have bled into one another in these same discourses.

The Covid pandemic and the subsequent responses implemented by most developed countries, from Lockdowns to masking requirements to vaccine mandates, created various anxieties. Most (not all) of these anxieties came from the political Right, which engaged Covid and its corrective measures as a novel element in a very long conspiracy narrative. It is beyond the scope of this or any course to exhaustively address this issue, but to give some sense of how these anxieties currently intersect, consider the following:

It’s all the same pool now: the left-wing vaccine pushers, abortion instigators, LGBT indoctrinators, child groomers, transgender genital mutilators, pedophiles and luciferians… they have become a homogenized group of death cult practitioners who feed on children while working to destroy every Christian person or pro-life on planet Earth.
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/roe-decision-brings-us-incredible-clarity-on-the-luciferians-running-the-abortion-child-sacrifice-cult/

It is this integration of how Covid and its public health responses into longstanding Rightwing conspiracies that this course explores.

The course begins with one of the many ways that the two periods – the rise of HIV and the rise of Covid intersect – the strange series of rallies Donald Trump held in the aftermath of his bout with Covid. From there we examine some isomorphisms between the ten-year stretch between the first oil shock in the 1970s and the rise of HIV in comparison to what we might call the long decade between the crash of 2008 and 2020, both period of financial instability, political anxieties, and increasing and ramifying conspiracy theories, predominantly, but not exclusively, in the Anglophone world. It then examines some of the politics of these different pandemics and how politics and knowledge now intersect.

Readings:
Topic I: Structural Change, Optimism, and Reaction

Roe, LGBTQ+, changes in Psychiatry. The beginning of reaction – moral majority, Southern Strategy. At the cusp of the Rightwing reaction against science. Also, at the time when it doesn’t seem to matter – the eradication of smallpox to the rise of HIV.

Quick Review Topic: Foucault Discipline and Punish
Power, Bio-Politics and Quarantine

More 1970s
War and Reaction: The Aftermaths of Vietnam through The War on Terror
The Rightwing after Vietnam
Bring the War Home
AIDS and American Apocalypticism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTB-1HQdifY

Assessment and permitted materials

Assignment: A critical review of one of the main books OR Choose one conspiracy discussed in this course and write an original paper on that.
AI generated essays are not accepted.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

The written assignment is counts for 70%. Attendance is obligatory, active participation and an effort to show knowledge of the readings counts for 30%. Both parts of the assessement criteria have to be fulfilled.
Minimum requirements and assessment criteria
• 91-100 points - 1 (excellent)
• 81-90 points - 2 (good)
• 71-80 points - 3 (satisfactory)
• 61-70 points - 4 (sufficient)

Examination topics

Reading list

Readings:

Topic I: Structural Change, Optimism, and Reaction

Roe, LGBTQ+, changes in Psychiatry. The beginning of reaction – moral majority, Southern Strategy. At the cusp of the Rightwing reaction against science. Also, at the time when it doesn’t seem to matter – the eradication of smallpox to the rise of HIV.

Quick Review Topic: Foucault Discipline and Punish
Power, Bio-Politics and Quarantine

More 1970s
War and Reaction: The Aftermaths of Vietnam through The War on Terror
The Rightwing after Vietnam
Bring the War Home
AIDS and American Apocalypticism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTB-1HQdifY

Topic IA: Religion and Pandemics

AIDS and American Apocalypticism
I Know Who Caused Covid-19: Pandemics and Xenophobia
HIV: Iconography and Conspiracy
HIV and “God’s Judgement”
https://hnewswire.com/aids-hiv-and-other-stds-are-part-of-gods-judgment/
https://new-world-order-for-dummies.blogspot.com/2009/04/aidshiv-vaccines.html
Satanization of man: the pandemic and the wound of narcissism 92-97 BENVENUTO
Communicating Covid-19 (in Castrillon and Marchevsky)

Topic II: Conspiracy and Narrative

How do Pandemics combine?
Why is Donald Trump Dancing to YMCA? https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/1019/1172424-donald-trump-ymca-maga-rallies-us-election-2020/
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/sars-cov-2-kills-t-cells-just-like
https://www.bitchute.com/video/I0vmepP1Lji8/
https://mediaarchives.gsradio.net/rense/special/rense_061622_hr1.mp3
Health, Sense, and Nonsense
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/trump-populist-conspiracism-autocracy-rfk-jr/681088/

Topic IIA: The (dis-)United States
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/

Is Public Health possible? Is “Science” possible?

Books:
Aids and American Apocalypticism (Thomas Long)
Corona Virus, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (Castrillon and Marchevsky)
AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease. Iconography. Gillman

Supplemental Readings
Hepatitis B vaccine (HBV) theory
The dermatologist Alan Cantwell, in self-published books entitled AIDS and the Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic (1988) and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot (1993), said that HIV is a genetically modified organism developed by U.S. Government scientists. The virus was then introduced into the population through hepatitis B (via the hepatitis B vaccine) experiments performed on gay and bisexual men between 1978 and 1981 in major U.S. cities. Cantwell claims that these experiments were directed by Wolf Szmuness, and that there was an ongoing government cover-up of the origins of the AIDS epidemic. Similar theories have been advanced by Robert B. Strecker,[9] Matilde Krim, and Milton William Cooper.
Oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory
In the 1999 version of his OPV AIDS hypothesis, Edward Hooper proposed that early batches of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) grown in cultures of chimpanzee kidney cells, infected with a chimpanzee virus, were the original source of HIV-1 in Central Africa. A vial of the batch most strongly implicated by Hooper was found in storage in the UK, and analysis found no HIV/SIV sequences or chimpanzee cellular components, but did find traces of macaque mitochondria. Analysis of five samples of OPV in storage at the Wistar Institute, including one from a batch used in the Belgian Congo between 1958 and 1960, found no chimpanzee DNA.[10] Other molecular biology and phylogenetic studies also contradict the hypothesis, and scientific consensus regards it as disproven.[11][12][13][14] A 2004 article in the journal Nature described the hypothesis as "refuted".[15]
HIV and the NOW:
https://new-world-order-for-dummies.blogspot.com/2009/04/aidshiv-vaccines.html

Robert Strecker, MD HIV man made Leonard Horwitz produces the text that “reports” on this discovery. Horwitz is a Dentist.
Sued Pfizer for “spreading spike proteins” https://www.sgtreport.com/2021/09/horowitz-hospitalized-

Association in the course directory

Last modified: Fr 21.03.2025 12:46