1937

——-

That candle is burning at both ends and down the middle, too.

It cannot all be laid at the door of resource-plundering or strategic thinking. Eventually it develops a momentum and a logic of its own. 

As the storm builds, the ethno-nationalists are out harnessing the wind, giving each other courage. […] While it is easy to take lofty moral positions, in truth, there is nothing simple about this problem. Because it is not a problem. It is a symptom of a great churning and a deep malaise. The assertion of ethnicity, race, caste, nationalism, sub-nationalism, patriarchy, and all kinds of identity, by exploiters as well as the exploited, has a lot – but of course not everything – to do with laying collective claim to resources (water, land, jobs, money) that are fast disappearing. […]

If we go down this warren and choose to stay there, if we allow our imaginations to be trapped within this matrix, and come to believe there is no other way of seeing things, if we lose sight of the sky and the bigger picture, then we are bound to find ourselves in conflicts that spiral and spread and multiply and could very easily turn apocalyptic. […]

Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction.

——-

In the spirit of the globalization of fascism, U.S. alt-right organizations are good friends of Hindu nationalists. Look to India, if you want to understand the world in microcosm. […]

It is interesting that countries that call themselves democracies – India, Israel, and the United States – are busy running military occupations. Kashmir is one of the deadliest and densest military occupations in the world. India transformed from colony to imperial power virtually overnight. There has not been a day since the British left India in August 1947 that the Indian army and paramilitary have not been deployed within the country’s borders against its “own people”: Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Kashmir, Jammu, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand. […]

As hatred is dripped into peoples’ souls, every day, with sickened hearts we wake up to Muslim-lynching videos put up on YouT*be by gloating vigilantes, news of Dalits being publicly flogged, of women and infants being raped, of thousands marching in support of people who have been arrested for rape, of those convicted for mass murder in the Gujarat pogrom being let out of jail while human rights defenders and thousands of indigenous people are in jail on charges of sedition, of children’s history textbooks being written by complete fools, of glaciers melting and of water tables plummeting […].

But it is all OK, because we are buying more weapons from Europe and the United States than almost anyone else. So, India, which has the largest population of malnutritioned children in the world, where hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers have committed suicide […], is still being celebrated as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. […]

Corporations are hosting happiness fairs and dissent seminars and sponsoring literature festivals in which free speech is stoutly defended by great writers. Dissent Is the Cool (and Corporate) New Way To Be.

What can we do about that?

When you think about the grandeur of the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti–Vietnam War protests, it makes you wonder whether real protest is even possible any more.

It is. It surely is.

I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, recently, when the largest Nazi march since World War II took place. The Nazis were outnumbered by anti-Nazi demonstrators, including the ferocious Ant*fa, by more than ten to one. In Kashmir, unarmed villagers face down army bullets. In Bastar, in Central India, the armed struggle by the poorest people in the world has stopped some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

It is important to salute people’s victories, even if they don’t always get reported on TV. At least the ones we know about.

Making people feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless is part of the propaganda.

But what is going on in the world right now is coming from every direction and has already gone too far. It has to stop. But how? I don’t have any cure-all advice, really. I think we all need to become seriously mutinous.

——-

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, almost all independent media have been banned, blocked and/or declared “foreign agents”. All others are subject to military censorship.

Media landscape

All privately owned independent TV channels are banned from broadcasting, except for cable entertainment channels. The Russian version of Euronews was suspended by Roskomnadzor, the media regulator, on 22 March 2022. Among the big print media outlets, which have belonged to Kremlin allies for a few years, those that had preserved their independence and were under constant threat of closure, like the independent tri-weekly Novaya Gazeta, have had to suspend their publications. Radio stations are in the same situation. Media outlets that have survived are faced with very strict self-censorship because of banned themes and words, and Western social networks are gradually being blocked.

Political context

President Vladimir Putin has seemed increasingly isolated from the outside world since the start of the pandemic. Only a very restricted circle now has access to him, and the last collective decision-making institutions, such as the Security Council, are no longer really collaborative. Parliament has become a chamber for recording decisions made by the Kremlin. The official discourse, relayed by an omnipresent propaganda, is mainly based on accounts of Russia’s “historical grievances” and conspiracy theories.

Legal framework

No journalist is safe from the threat of serious charges under vaguely worded draconian laws that were often adopted in haste. Many laws relating to freedom of expression that had been adopted in recent years – including defamation and “fake news” laws – were amended in order to incorporate them into the Penal Code at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The invasion of Ukraine gave a new impetus to this process, with parliament hastily adopting amendments under which “false information” about the Russian armed forces and any other Russian state body operating abroad is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Economic context

The radical sanctions imposed on Russia by the Western democracies in response to the invasion of Ukraine have suddenly severed much of the Russian economy from Europe’s, with which it was closely integrated. This will likely result in a very long and extremely deep crisis. Beyond censorship – which has forced many media outlets to close and has impoverished the few remaining independent journalists, forcing them to change professions or go abroad – the regional media will be among the first victims of this economic crisis.

Sociocultural context

Although the internet connection rate is very high, almost two-thirds of Russians get their news mainly from television, which is controlled by the government, and from Russian social media such as VKontakte. Subjects such as homosexuality and religious feelings have gradually become off limits for the media under Vladimir Putin, who has encouraged a certain conservatism in Russian society.

Safety

In recent years, in addition to heavy sentences and even torture suffered by some journalists, mainly at the regional level, the frequent use of fines and short-term detentions under various pretexts have been added to the arsenal of systematic intimidation against journalists. The media are also under threat of arbitrary inclusion on the list of “foregin agents”, a status that comes with heavy bureaucratic hurdles and legal risks. Faced with additional risks incurred since the state of the war in Ukraine, many journalists working for independent media outlets have chosen exile.

a war criminal dilf,

Fëanor, Curufin

 his himbo horse-boy son,

Celegorm

 his other smart and quiet son who just wants to prove himself,

Maedhros, Celebrimbor

 a scholar with a knife,

Caranthir, Amrod

 a traumatized artist with a knife,

Maglor, Amras

 a artifabrian milf 

Nerdanel

and an adopted Depressed Boy (with a knife)-

April Studyblr Challenge~ Day 22

– Complete a sporcle quiz related to one of your subjects –

And in case anyone is wondering what happened to Amrod and Fëanor:

It really was a bit unnecessary to include them, in my opinion.  Also leaving them out gave me a great opportunity for another “Fëanor forgets that Amrod and Amras are different people and/or can’t tell them apart” joke.