Patterned silencing

Digital repression has become a structural filter on Meta’s platforms, deciding who is heard and who is erased. In October and November 2023 alone, Human Rights Watch documented over a thousand cases where Instagram and Facebook removed or suppressed peaceful expressions of solidarity with Palestine.

The patterns were systematic: deleted posts or stories, restricted features, search bans and the quiet throttling of reach known as “shadowbanning.” That same month, Meta’s translation algorithm added the word “terrorist” to Palestinian users’ bios. The company later apologized for the “bug,” but for many, it felt like a slip revealing the machine’s logic.

At the center of this machinery sits Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which functions less like apps and more like global infrastructure. With several billion daily users across its platforms, Meta’s design choices effectively dictate much of the world’s visible reality. When Meta downgrades, deletes or distorts Palestinian content, it is not a marginal glitch on a niche site; it is the main artery of digital communication constricting a people’s ability to speak and be seen.

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“All those collaborators went into the system”, says Manolis Glezos, “into the government mechanism – during the civil war, after the civil war and their sons went into the military Junta. The deposits remain, like cells in the system. Unlike France, or even Germany, there was no de-Nazification. In fact, just the opposite: While other countries purged their Nazis, Greece promoted them, because although we liberated Greece, the Nazi collaborators won the war, thanks to the British. And the deposits remain, like bacilli in the system”.

But there is one last thing Glezos would like to make clear, that we have failed to raise during our three conversations. “You haven’t asked: why do I go on? Why I am doing this when I am 92 years and two months old?” he says, fixing us with his gaze. “I could, after all, be sitting on a sofa in slippers with my feet up,” he jests. “So why do I do this?”

And he answers himself: “You think that the man sitting opposite you is Manolis but you are wrong. I am not him. And I am not him because I have not forgotten that every time someone was about to be executed, they would say: ‘Don’t forget me. When you say good morning, think of me. When you raise a glass, say my name.’ And that is what I am doing talking to you, or doing any of this. The man you see before you is all those people. And all this is about not forgetting them.”

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Why should we be interested in a battle that took place 80 years ago, in December 1944, in Athens? Dekemvriana (‘December events’), the clash of British troops and Greek government forces with Greek communist resistance fighters has become known, was a highly significant incident in World War II, which however remains little known outside of Greece. It was indeed the sole instance where Allied forces clashed in an armed conflict during the war, and the first military intervention by an Allied army in a liberated country. An intervention, which may chronologically fall within the context of World War II, which had not yet ended, but politically it shifts our gaze towards the Cold War, which had not yet begun. Furthermore, Dekemvriana was an instance of popular uprising with a distinct class-based character. Citizens, mainly from the poor districts of Athens and Piraeus, took up arms and fought against a well-organized and well-equipped Allied army operating with a colonial logic, and the Greek conservative forces that supported it. The insurgents may have been severely lacking in weapons and inadequately organized, but they were also driven by a deep belief that justice was on their side and that they fought for a democratic post-war Greece.

Dekemvriana is a typical example of how a deep crisis, and indeed in its worst possible form, that of war and a foreign military occupation, can in a very limited time sweep away political constellations, and provoke their rearrangement or even their complete overthrow on a national and international level.[1] The clash of December also shows us that in times of crisis, the relations of dependence between great powers and peripheral states, are revealed in their full extent. As we will see below, in their attempt to regain power, the Greek government-in-exile and the country’s King allowed, if not sought, the crude involvement of British political and military force in settling domestic Greek affairs. Dekemvriana was an dramatic concession of national independence. Finally, the Battle of Athens shows us that the post-war world had begun in earnest, well before field marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945.
[…]
The sunny morning of Saturday, December 3 did not foreshadow what would follow. When the first large bloc of protesters appeared in the square, the police opened fire killing at least 13 protesters and injured more than 60. We know that the order for the police to shoot at the unarmed crowd was given by the Police Chief, Angelos Evert. However, we do not know who gave the order to Evert. Many pointed to the monarchists, who were the only ones who would likely benefit from a disrupted political process. The EAM decided not to make an armed response.
[…]
Dekemvriana turned Athens into a battle field. Military operations began on December 4, 1944 and ended on January 11, 1945. They can be divided them into two phases: until December 17, when the ELAS had the initiative, with the small number of of British forces backed into a defensive posture; and after December 17, when the arrival of reinforcements gave the initiative to the British.

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So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction.)
[…]
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
[…]
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

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I agree with Professor Jack Goldsmith that if the media reporting is accurate, this military operation is a “dishonorable strike” that is illegal under international law and the laws of war. This sentiment and logic was echoed by former U.S. military lawyers. The illegal order also runs contrary to longstanding U.S. military doctrine and U.S. Navy Regulations governing the treatment of survivors at sea. (See, also, this analysis by Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman.)

But beyond the troubling legal issues associated with the strike, killing unarmed and vulnerable survivors is stunningly shortsighted. Killing survivors of a military strike is not just patently illegal and morally reprehensible; it is strategically reckless.

The United States, which has military forces deployed around the globe, cannot build a safer world for its own servicemembers by discarding basic laws of war. History shows that when America blatantly abandons humane norms and the law of war, it ultimately endangers its own people.

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Wachowski—who has made it crystal clear in the past that The Matrix is a trans allegory—also noted that “Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is … That is what fascism does. It takes these things, these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations or truisms about humanity and life, and they turn them [into] something else so that they remove the weight of what those things represent.”

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The Matrix Was Intended to Be a Trans Story, Says Lilly Wachowski

At its core, The Matrix is also the story of a person who realizes they’re trapped in a place where they can’t be themselves, escapes, and is reborn in a new world as their true self. And considering the film was written and directed by two trans women, it’s no surprise that Lilly Wachowski says telling a trans allegory was the intent of the film all along.

Lisa Doe versus Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, Coexecutors of Epstein Estate

NES, LLC, 
Financial Trust Company, Inc. (FTC), 
 Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, HBRK Associates, Inc. 

Reuters “Two of Jeffrey Epstein’s close advisers can face victims’ claims”
By Jonathan Stempel
August 5, 2024

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian in Manhattan rejected arguments by Epstein’s former personal lawyer Darren Indyke and former accountant Richard Kahn that victims cannot pursue a class action because many agreed not to sue after settling claims against Epstein’s estate.

“… Indyke’s lawyer Daniel Weiner said they “emphatically reject” accusations they knew about or were complicit in Epstein’s wrongdoing.”

“Victims said Indyke and Kahn helped Epstein create a complex web of corporations and bank accounts that let him hide his abuses and pay victims and recruiters, while leaving them “richly compensated” for their work.
McCawley and another lawyer for the victims, David Boies, helped obtain $365 million of settlements with JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N)
, opens new tab and Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), opens new tab after accusing them of missing red flags about Epstein, once a lucrative client.

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Carroll Quigley’s account of the Milner/Rhodes network advances a clear causal line: to avoid a western land war and to husband imperial strength, an influential British elite faction sought to appease Germany in the west and encourage its expansion eastward, which required neutralizing France’s treaty‑enforcement posture and devaluing the eastern alliances France had built. This policy was propagated through press campaigns, research institutes, salon diplomacy, and personnel placements, reaching its apogee at Munich. It failed because Hitler’s ambitions were not territorially modular and because dismantling eastern buffers removed the very conditions that might have contained him. The wager that Germany could be redirected into a German–Soviet collision without engulfing the west proved catastrophically wrong; the west was engulfed anyway, now with worse odds.

Whether one treats Quigley’s network map as airtight or as an overdrawn conspiracy of proximity, the logic he uncovers—sidelining France to point Hitler east—offers a powerful lens on the appeasement era. It shows how grand designs can fuse with institutional echo chambers, and how, in the hands of capable men convinced of their mission, a strategy meant to avert catastrophe can prepare it instead.

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To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.

Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”

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Trump’s most original idea? Redefining antisemitism

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In 2020, which seems a long time ago, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

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