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Today I welcomed young peacebuilders from around the world to Mäntyniemi. To bring about change, we need new generations to promote peace, foster dialogue, and strengthen mutual understanding. https://t.co/ryiHk3dYAE #Peacebuilding #YouthLeadership #Dialogue #Nospecificcountrycodescanbeidentifiedfromthetweet.

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The Destruction of Historical Understanding The third lesson we can take away from *1984* is that if you want to control people, you must destroy their understanding of history. Orwell writes, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” There is a clear example of this in Canada. In order to create one large, international communal state in which everyone is expected to care about everyone else, those in power must shatter people’s understanding of history and persuade them to support that agenda. How do you accomplish that? Canada’s unmarked-graves controversy is a useful example. The story became global, and much of the political class and media supported it. No bodies were ever found. Instead, ground-penetrating radar detected anomalies in the soil, which were then described as unmarked graves containing children. From the very beginning, there was no physical evidence to support such a bold claim. But that was never the point. The point was to make people believe that supporting Canada meant supporting the genocide of children allegedly buried beneath the ground on which they stood. Whether or not people accepted the claims, the narrative had a powerful effect: it undermined patriotism and weakened any sense of loyalty to the nation.

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Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) and related gender ideological-belief measures were strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) was not simply standing in for being politically left-wing” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Support for coercion, punishment, and violence appears to be tied less to liberalism generally than to an authoritarian disposition organized around left-wing ideological content” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Gender ideology may supply authoritarian psychology with a structured map of perceived outgroups, threat sources, and oppressor classes” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Dissent becomes not a legitimate position but a failure of professional duty or an act of harm” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “The same psychological machinery operates on the extreme left”- Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Violence can come to seem permissible or necessary” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Three findings pull in the same direction. People who strongly endorse gender ideology positions score dramatically higher on left-wing authoritarianism than their political identity alone would predict. Furthermore, both LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) and CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) predicted support for political violence” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Together, these findings support the paper's core claim: gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and—in those already disposed toward force—that violence is legitimate” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “One mechanism by which clinical content may translate into violence permission deserves note. Trans-Genocide Belief—the perceived likelihood that a genocide of individuals that identify as transgender is currently underway in the United States—is predicted to more strongly relate to CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) and LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) than to political identity and to be associated with elevated justification for political violence” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “This prediction is consistent with broader research showing that perceived threat, existential threat, and collective victimhood can increase support for hardline, punitive, or exclusionary action against outgroups, particularly when paired with authoritarian dispositions or strong moral conviction (Armaly & Enders, 2022; Carriere et al., 2022; Hirschberger et al., 2016; Kljajić et al., 2025; Schori-Eyal et al., 2014; Skitka, 2010)” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Related work on moralization and violent intergroup conflict further suggests that when a political conflict is framed as a moral emergency involving dangerous or demonized outgroups, violence can come to seem permissible or necessary (Mooijman et al., 2018; Saguy & Reifen-Tagar, 2022)” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “The practical stakes are straightforward. Research frameworks for understanding authoritarianism have historically focused overwhelmingly on the political right, while analogous left-wing pathways have received far less attention. Yet federal agencies and public safety officials are concerned not only with ideology in the abstract, but with radicalization pathways: the content that tells people who to fear, why the situation is urgent, and when force becomes acceptable” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology “This study suggests that the same psychological machinery operates on the extreme left, and that it may be running through institutional channels—clinical guidelines, professional standards, credentialed expertise—that current threat-detection frameworks are not well designed to recognize” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Violence connected to gender ideology remains largely undocumented in the academic literature. This study provides a first systematic empirical look at the psychological infrastructure that makes such violence conceivable” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Both LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) and CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) were significantly positively correlated with justification for political violence across all six targets” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Our main findings for youth starting treatment with blockers include: At baseline, about one-quarter of these youth had clinically concerning scores for depression and anxiety. About one-quarter reported having thought about suicide, and 8% reported having attempted suicide in the past. These numbers are on par with the population of middle school youth at large” - The Trans Youth Care - United States “Our main findings for youth starting treatment with GAH include: At baseline, about half of these youth had clinically concerning scores for depression and anxiety. About two-thirds reported having thought about suicide, and one-quarter reported having attempted. By two years after starting GAH, these youth showed increased scores for life satisfaction, appearance congruence (having the physical appearance of one's body match one's gender identity), positive emotions, and psychological well-being and decreased scores for depression and anxiety” - The Trans Youth Care - United States

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Why Therapy Culture Is Making Us Weak Why, despite unprecedented mental-health awareness and therapy language, does mental health seem to worsen? If both “the cure” and “the disease” expand together, we should ask what culture produces them. Modern therapy culture often teaches us to prioritize feelings, explain flaws through trauma, and treat negative emotions as reactions to others. Carl Jung proposed a different order: consciousness—judgment, values, and will—should govern the unconscious, including instincts and emotions. Health means understanding these forces without letting them rule. Today that hierarchy is frequently reversed: emotion outranks reason, and “lived experience” can outrank evidence. Jung warned this resembles “psychological Bolshevism,” where lower impulses overthrow higher faculties in the name of freedom. Nietzsche cautioned that “for every drive wants to be master.” The key question isn’t only where feelings come from, but whether we govern them. Therapy culture can also weaken self-criticism, treating conscience, guilt, and shame as oppressive rather than corrective. With “concept creep” (trauma/harm expanding to cover normal discomfort), personal agency can shrink: if everything is done to us, responsibility becomes harder to exercise. This can spread socially: victim identities bond through grievance, replacing judgment with collective resentment. History shows where that leads. The defense is older than therapy: govern yourself before demanding the world be changed.

The Great AI Confusion: Producing an Answer Is Not the Same as Understanding It https://t.co/zUtWwU8DEr #AIConfusion #UnderstandingAI #MachineLearning #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.Thus #theresultisempty.

AI is making output cheap. It can generate proofs, diagnoses, designs, code, arguments and art. But producing an answer is not the same as understanding the question. The real scarcity in the AI age may be judgment, meaning and responsibility. New article ↓ #AI #Automation #Judgment #Therearenospecificcountrycodesmentionedinthetweet.

🚨🔵 Chelsea mantain active talks for Emiliano Martínez deal with player’s camp and Aston Villa, understanding if can be a loan move — plus all details on formula. Dibu would be open to joining #CFC as reported, keen on the move. Up to Chelsea with final decision to follow. https://t.co/SBnFcECOqF #ChelseaFC #EmilianoMartínez #LoanDeal #GB #AR

A new study suggests that warming land masses may be pulling the world's monsoon systems northwards, with impact on food production, water security & billions of people's lives The missing piece in understanding how #cllimatechange is reshaping the planet? https://t.co/Ql63qJuE9t #ClimateChange #Monsoon #FoodSecurity #Thetweetdoesnotspecificallymentionanycountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

BREAKING De stank van de beerput wordt met de dag groter… Tegelijk blijkt dat de club die kritische stemmen monddood probeerde te maken met het etiket ‘complotdenker’, zelf betrokken was bij een echt complot. En ‘complot’ is hier geen containerbegrip. —> David Morens, jarenlang dé senior adviseur in het Office of the Director van NIAID onder Anthony Fauci, heeft nu schuld bekend aan “samenzwering tegen de Verenigde Staten” en riskeert 5 jaar cel. —> Morens heeft bekend dat hij en zijn medesamenzweerders afspraken hadden gemaakt om communicatie over de oorsprong van het Covid virus bewust geheim te houden, en wel zo dat die communicatie niet via FOIA (Openbaarheid van bestuur) kon worden opgevraagd. —> Die verborgen communicatie ging om. over de financiering van “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”, waarover onderzoek werd uitgevoerd aan het Wuhan Institute of Virology, én over inspanningen om de lab-leakhypothese tegen te spreken. WTF? Morens was trouwens geen kleine garnaal. Als senior adviseur adviseerde hij de NIAID-top en briefte hij Dr Fauci die op zijn beurt de president, het Congres en het Amerikaanse publiek informeerde. —> Dus terwijl mensen publiekelijk werden (en nog steeds worden) weggezet als ‘complotdenkers’ omdat ze kritische vragen stelden over de mogelijke laboorsprong van COVID, bestond er achter de schermen daadwerkelijk een echte samenzwering om relevante communicatie verborgen te houden? En neen, dit is nog niet het bewijs dat COVID uit een lab kwam maar het bewijst wél dat mensen in de hoogste regionen van de Amerikaanse gezondheids-diensten bewust probeerden te verhinderen dat het publiek bepaalde communicatie over de oorsprong vh virus te zien kreeg. Dat is dus nu alvast geen ‘complottheorie’ meer. Dé vraag is waarom men bewust heeft samengezworen om dit verborgen te houden? Ik vraag me echt af of iedereen zich wel echt bewust is van de implicaties van wat hier allemaal naar buiten aan het komen is? Waarom is dit in onze media trouwens niet dé mega headline? #Covid19 #Samenzwering #Transparantie

Les médias Français sont devenus un simulacre de journalisme. Qui couvre que le bras droit de Fauci a plaidé coupable pour "complot" sur le thème covid ? Oui...vous avez bien lu. Les médias sont devenus des propagandistes qui ne couvrent pas les informations qui pourraient gêner le pouvoir en place. Jusqu' à quand? N'avez-vous pas honte? Demandez la levée du secret défense. Transparence pour le peuple! "complot dans un stratagème visant à éviter les demandes de la FOIA et la Federal Records Act liées aux subventions de recherche sur la COVID-19. Le FBI a découvert que Morens, le Co-Conspirateur 1, le Co-Conspirateur 2 et d’autres ont conspiré pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 pour frauder les États-Unis après que les National Institutes of Health ont résilié la subvention du Co-Conspirateur 1. Le NIH a résilié la subvention, « Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence », sur la base d’allégations selon lesquelles la COVID-19 a émergé de l’Institut de virologie de Wuhan (WIV) à Wuhan, en Chine. M. Morens et ses co-conspirateurs ont ensuite convenu par écrit de dissimuler intentionnellement leurs communications à la vue du public en correspondant via le compte Gmail personnel de Morens plutôt que via son compte de courriel officiel du NIH. Cette enquête du FBI reste en cours. Personne n’est au-dessus des lois." #Transparence #Journalisme #COVID19

Idiots, get Ukraine into NATO and we have peace! How many more years of war, hesitation, summits, empty declarations and failed “peace initiatives” does Europe need before understanding the obvious? Ukraine outside NATO means permanent insecurity. It leaves Moscow with the hope https://t.co/5Slo5vbYLx #UkraineNATO #PeaceForUkraine #EndTheWar #UA #RU #NATO

Penrose's argument, in a nutshell, is that since humans can understand Goedel's theorem, consciousness is uncomputable and physics incomplete. I've always found it quite charming, the idea that understanding Goedel's theorem is an indicator for consciousness, seeing how few #Gödel #Consciousness #Penrose #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

How life manifests itself as an insoluble contradiction. Slavery, the desire for dominance in relations between men and women, the commission of murders, violence and criminal acts occur as a result of an irresistible desire on the part of the perpetrators. The desire on the part of the victims and their attempts to counteract them turn out to be unattainable desires. Violence is a manifestation of sadism. It is caused and its level is determined by the level of the male sex hormone testosterone. It leads to violence on the one hand, and on the other hand determines the possibility of fertilization of female individuals and the continuation of life by creating offspring. OBVIOUSLY THIS IS A FUNDAMENTALLY INSOLVABLE CONTROVERSY THAT AFFECTS AND DETERMINES THE WHOLE OF LIFE. PEOPLE CANNOT BELIEVE, UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT THIS FACT. THEY DEEPLY BELIEVE THAT CONTROVERSIES ARE NOT INSOLVABLE AND THAT THERE ARE SOLUTIONS FOR THEM. THEY ARE ENDLESSLY DISCUSSED, TRYING TO APPLY THEMSELVES THROUGHOUT LIFE AND THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE EXISTENCE OF HUMANITY. And all this turns out to be vain efforts, ineffective, fruitless, fruitless. The ingenious explanation, opening everyone's eyes to the truth is the understanding that THESE RELATIONS ARE ALWAYS ON THE EDGE OF CONFLICT, THAT THEY ARE TOLERANCE OF THE INTOLERABLE. All attempts to overcome slavery are illusory. Attempts to create a socialist and communist society, to present slavery as part of family relations, as paternalism, that it can be replaced by democracy, that slaves can become wage workers and their interests can be effectively defended by protest actions, strikes, and trade unions are fruitless delusions. Man with his whole nature strives for slave ownership. Slave owners are sadists who kill slaves in case of disobedience. They have power over their lives and this creates in them a sense of superiority, of a chosen higher caste, a natural selection of the smartest, the most capable. eternal holders of sacred power given by God, a manifestation of higher justice and harmony. This is a delusion that completely blinds the mind. The truth is that slave ownership stems from cannibalism and they cannot realize this, understand that this is the truth. In Bulgaria, the slave-owners are called chorbadjii-izednicy, that is, cannibals, and this is not idle talk, but a very accurate definition of things. Slaves are masochists, weak, helpless to defend themselves. They are completely blocked by the power structures of the slave owners. In antiquity, they were usually soldiers, punished to be slaves because they tried to kill the slave owners. Relations between men and women are also on the verge of conflict, tolerance of the intolerable. They have a completely unacceptable, contradictory nature and this is an objective fact. The similarity that they are the same people, regardless of the different sex, is an illusion, self-deception. They are totally different and their relations are based on reconciliation or dominance, tyranny of one sex over the other. Violent, criminal manifestations have the same nature as slavery and relations between the sexes. All attempts to eradicate them are fruitless. They cannot even be limited.

The Bulgarian government has signed this week a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bulgarian leading space company EnduroSat. In the Dobroslavtsi industrial zone, on the disused former military airfield, the company will build a large-scale production centre for satellites.🚀 https://t.co/aU1iUWNeNK #BulgarianGovernment #EnduroSat #SpaceIndustry #BG

AI has learned to manipulate people when needed What definitely caught my attention this week was the understanding that AI is now ready not only to find zero-day vulnerabilities but it is ready and can also manipulate people better than many hackers do to get its way. Yes, we https://t.co/zKh2UO4C2a #AI #Manipulation #Cybersecurity #Nospecificcountrycodesareidentifiedintheprovidedtweet.

Metaphysics of the Solitary Absolute: Philosophical and Legal Analysis of the Thesis of Solitary Amorality ​The Thesis of Solitary Amorality, formulated by Tom Nesky under the banner of the Axiom of Relationality of Law and Being, constitutes a radical challenge to classical and contemporary normative theories. Its central premise—stating that law, morality, and the category of crime are not inherent properties of reality, but artificial products of social relations—requires a rigorous deconstruction at the intersection of legal positivism, phenomenological existentialism, ontological anarchism, and monistic metaphysics. This paper attempts a systematic analysis of the intellectual pillars of this thesis, examining its internal coherence, genealogical roots, and consequences for the understanding of freedom and human subjectivity. ​The Systemic Construction of Crime vs. Pure Theory of Law ​The first pillar of the Thesis of Solitary Amorality, designated as Nullum Crimen Sine Systema, posits that law does not discover pre-legal categories of evil, but brings them into existence through the very act of establishing a boundary of permissibility. This assertion exhibits a profound convergence with 20th-century legal positivism, particularly with Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law (Reine Rechtslehre). Kelsen advocated for a methodological purification of legal science from ethical, sociological, and political elements, defining law as a normative system founded upon a hypothetical basic norm (Grundnorm). ​In the Kelsenian view, the legal system functions as a coercive apparatus devoid of inherent moral value. A crucial point of intersection with Nesky's thesis is the elimination of the traditional dualism between acts that are inherently evil (mala in se) and acts prohibited merely by law (mala prohibita). Kelsen argued that an act becomes unlawful solely when a legal norm attaches state-enforced coercion to it. Unlawfulness is not an ontological property of the act, but the result of a relationship of normative imputation. This implies that the law does not penalize an act because it is intrinsically evil; rather, an act is considered evil solely because it has been subjected to systemic penalization. ​This clash became prominent during the debates surrounding the Nuremberg trials, where positions based on natural law and legal positivism collided. While prosecutors such as Robert Jackson invoked universal moral norms (mala in se) as the basis for punishing criminals despite the previously binding positive law of the Third Reich, Kelsen pointed out the theoretical inconsistency of such an approach. He argued that judging on the basis of retroactive law (ex post facto) constitutes a breach in the systemic coherence of positivism, even if it might be justified by political and historical necessity. ​Nesky's project imparts an existential dimension of oppression to this structure, bringing it close to the critique of the state formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche famously described the state as "the coldest of all cold monsters," which devours the individual's singularity and imposes herd morality upon them. The gaze of the state, mediated through the Other, paralyzes the sovereignty of the individual and forces them to navigate within arbitrarily designated normative boundaries. Every stroke drawn across the chaos of reality establishes a boundary, and every boundary instantly creates the concept of its transgression. ​The Paradox of the Systemic Cage and the Limits of Ontological Anarchism ​The second pillar of the thesis—The Paradox of the Systemic Cage—points to the impossibility of escaping the system through rules alone. Every attempt to negate the existing order, from establishing anarchist structures to escaping into geographical isolation, immediately transforms into a new system whose primary imperative becomes the defense and maintenance of that very absence of rules. This process of structural looping finds its reflection in the current of ontological anarchism formulated by Hakim Bey (pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson). ​Bey, drawing on a synthesis of Nietzscheanism, Situationist theory of the spectacle, and chaos esotericism, recognized that classical revolutions striving to overthrow the state inevitably reproduce structures of domination, becoming new forms of confinement. As an alternative, he proposed the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). TAZ is a tactic for creating temporary, non-hierarchical spaces that deliberately evade formal structures of state control. The key element of TAZ is its ephemerality: before the system can map, define, and absorb the autonomous zone, it must dissolve itself and relocate to another point in space-time. ​Attempts to transform TAZ into Permanent Autonomous Zones (PAZ) immediately encounter the paradox noted by Nesky. The need to defend and codify freedom within a lasting community gives rise to internal rules, mechanisms of exclusion, and hierarchy. For this reason, Murray Bookchin criticized ontological anarchism (calling it "lifestyle anarchism" or "bourgeois anarchism") for its lack of political realism and its flight from systemic struggle against capital and state in favor of aesthetic rebellion. The convergence of these perspectives demonstrates that freedom defined as reactive resistance to a system remains structurally determined by it. ​The Dissolution of the Relational Mirror: The Existential Gaze and the Collapse of Morality ​The third pillar of the thesis, designated as The Dissolution of the Mirror (L'Autre), posits that good and evil require the presence of an external witness and judge. This assertion represents a direct application of Jean-Paul Sartre's existential phenomenology, particularly his analysis of the Gaze (le look / le regard) and the relation to the Other (l'Autre) presented in Being and Nothingness. ​Sartre illustrates the constitutive role of the Other through an analysis of the voyeur's situation. At the moment of complete absorption in the act of peeping through a keyhole, the subject's consciousness is pre-reflective—the voyeur does not reflect on himself; his consciousness completely merges with the act being performed. Only the sudden sound of footsteps in the hallway shatters this unity. The voyeur realizes that he himself is seen, and is instantly paralyzed by shame. ​For Sartre, shame is not a purely internal emotion; it is shame of oneself before the Other. The Gaze of the Other objectifies the free subject (being-for-itself—pour-soi), freezing them into a specific role and moral evaluation (being-for-others—pour-autrui). As Ellie Anderson points out, Descartes' formula "I think, therefore I am" is replaced in Sartre by "I feel shame, therefore Others exist." The Gaze of the Other marks the birth of social morality, wherein the individual learns to view themselves from a third-person perspective. ​This existential dynamic corresponds to the Nietzschean genealogy of "bad conscience." Nietzsche demonstrates that morality and guilt are products of the forced internalization of human instincts that could no longer be discharged outwardly due to social barriers. Forced into the constraints of society, man turns against himself, creating an internal judge (conscience) modeled on the external tyrant. ​This vision also resonates with the classical theory of Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan, Hobbes explicitly declares that in the state of nature, where there is no common power, there is no law, and where there is no law, no notion of injustice exists. Concepts of good, evil, justice, and property are attributes of man living in society, not in solitude. Removing the social fabric reverts the individual to a state in which theft and injury lose their raison d'être due to the absence of relational reference to the Other. #philosophy # metaphysics # thesis # morality

A Generation That Forgot the Shape of the Square On memory left to die alone By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In a house near mine, there is a boy of thirteen. Born in 2013 just a few months younger than the July coup itself, younger than the new republic under whose shadow we now live. I asked him once, with no preamble, no test, out of nothing more than passing curiosity: do you know what January was? He answered simply, without hesitation, without any sense that he was missing something: "An old revolution, against Mubarak, right?" Not entirely wrong. But it is everything he knows. The name Tahrir Square means nothing specific to him. The sound of the crowd chanting has no echo in his mind. He does not know that his own family whom he sees every day saying "thank God for stability," who warn him against "chaos" whenever a political headline crosses the screen once, at a moment two years before he was born, went down into the street, betting their entire lives on the possibility that something might change. This article is not about politics. It is about memory, and about who decides what gets told and what is left to die in silence. I. Who Erases the Picture? The first question that comes to mind is the easiest and most deceptive one: who erases this memory? And where do we begin holding them accountable? But the truth is too complex to reduce to a single actor. No one actually erases memory, in the literal sense of the act. There is no ministry called the "Ministry of Forgetting," no presidential decree ordering January struck from the collective consciousness. What happens is simpler than that, and more dangerous at once: the subject is simply never told. School says nothing. The textbook leaps from one period to another without pausing on January for more than two faded lines, composed with deliberate neutrality, devoid of any detail that might make the event feel alive to its young reader. Television no longer has any reason to return to it; the programmes that once hosted witnesses and activists stopped years ago, replaced by an official discourse that mentions January only in passing, as an unfortunate prelude to the "stability" that supposedly followed. And the home the most dangerous link of all has become afraid of the subject. Speech now carries a price, and many families, whether consciously or by sheer survival instinct, have decided that silence is safer than the story. The father who marched fears passing on to his son a curiosity that might one day lead him into trouble the family cannot afford. The mother who lost a friend in the events prefers not to reopen the wound before a child who does not yet grasp the weight of loss. And so, generation after generation, the circle of those who know shrinks, and the circle of those who do not even ask because they do not know there is anything worth asking widens. No one decided to erase the memory through an explicit decision. The memory was simply left to die alone, with no one tending it. And it is precisely this decentralised absence of responsibility that makes this kind of erasure more dangerous than any direct official ban: there is no single decision to challenge, no single body to hold accountable. Responsibility is distributed across thousands of small decisions made by thousands of individuals, each within their own context, each seeming reasonable when viewed in isolation. II. Why This Is More Dangerous Than Direct Repression An objection might be raised: is direct repression arrest, imprisonment, publishing bans not far more lethal than mere gradual forgetting? The answer is complex, and deserves calm unpacking. Direct repression can be seen. It can be documented, and the victim can know they are a victim, can tell their story, and their pain can become a testimony added to the collective memory, even if it never reaches justice. The political prisoner knows he is a political prisoner. The journalist banned from writing knows he is banned, and can tell the world he is banned. Direct repression, for all its cruelty, leaves a trace that can be followed. But a generation that has forgotten something happened at all does not even have a starting point from which to ask. This thirteen-year-old boy will never ask "why were we repressed?" because he does not know there is anything deserving that question in the first place. He feels no absence, because he does not know there is anything absent. He simply lives in a version of reality stripped of an entire chapter of his country’s history, and never for a moment suspects that this void is a void at all. Here lies the essence of the danger: direct repression creates victims who know they are victims. Erasure of memory, when it succeeds, creates a generation that does not even know it has been deprived of anything. And deprivation that is not felt cannot be resisted, because resistance always begins with an awareness of loss. The regime that came after 2013 does not need to convince the new generation that January was a mistake. That would be an arduous, costly task, requiring sustained propaganda and continuous effort to persuade each individual one by one. It is far easier, and strategically far more efficient, simply to ensure they never know it was anything at all. The void requires no defence; it requires only silence, and silence is free and always available. III. The Four Mechanisms of Erasure Four complementary mechanisms can be identified working together to produce this collective void not as an organised conspiracy, but as a system of incentives that pushes each party, consciously or not, to contribute to the same process. The first mechanism: formal education. The curriculum, as currently designed, treats January as a passing footnote rather than a founding event deserving detail and analysis. The student memorises two dates the start of the revolution and its presumed end without understanding why people took to the streets, what they were demanding, or how they felt in that pivotal moment. The second mechanism: broadcast media. The channels that once hosted live discussions on January, featuring varied perspectives, have gradually disappeared, or transformed their discourse entirely. Today’s televised image either ignores the anniversary altogether, or invokes it only to frame it as a prelude to chaos that must be avoided. The third mechanism: the silence of homes. This is the most dangerous of all, precisely because it is the most human and understandable. Parents who lived through the experience protect it with silence, not out of aversion to the story, but out of fear of its price. This silence, however legitimate its motives, achieves exactly the same effect as official censorship: it blocks the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The fourth mechanism: the absence of alternative spaces. Even those among the new generation who wish to know cannot easily find places to look. Archives are scattered, trustworthy websites are blocked or require effort to reach, and personal testimonies are dispersed across corners of the internet that an ordinary student at an ordinary school will never stumble upon. These four mechanisms require no central coordination to work together. Each naturally serves the others, and all converge on a single result: a growing void in the consciousness of every new generation. IV. Memory as an Act of Resistance If erasure operates without a centre, then resisting it must also be decentralised. No one waits for a government decision to restore January to the curriculum, nor for a television programme to revive the testimonies. Resistance here is necessarily individual, happening in small details, in passing conversations, in the simple decision to tell rather than to stay silent. This is exactly what I try to do, without any claim to heroism, without any grand mission. I try, whenever I can, to tell the thirteen-year-old boy and others like him details that are never written in official reports or in schoolbooks: what the voices in the square sounded like, how someone felt the first time they realised change was possible, what that moment of hope was like before everything changed. The goal is not to bring back the past; the past cannot be brought back. The goal is that this boy, when he grows older and asks again and he will ask, because the questions always return at some point finds someone to tell him the full story, not two faded lines in a schoolbook. That he knows the stability he is told is the fruit of "wisdom" has a prior history, that this history carried other possibilities, and that real people bet their lives on those possibilities. V. Why This Matters Now Talking about the memory of a generation not yet aware might seem an intellectual luxury next to more urgent matters: arrests, a collapsing economy, regional wars. But the truth is that this issue is the foundation on which every other issue is built. A people who do not know they once rose up will not understand why they should ever think of rising again. A generation raised to believe "stability" is the only natural state possible will never ask itself what drove its own parents, shortly before it was born, to risk everything for an alternative that was never guaranteed. Memory is not a luxury; it is the reference point by which every generation measures its present, and through which it determines what is possible and what is not. And whoever understands this understands why erasing memory, not direct repression alone, is among the most important tools of any regime seeking to guarantee its permanence: because a people who have forgotten they were once free will not even know they are missing freedom. Memory, like the word, needs someone to tell it in order to survive. And when the tellers stop, memory does not die suddenly; it withers slowly, generation after generation, until the day comes when a boy asks an innocent question, and finds no one to answer him but two faded lines in a schoolbook.

Ukraine's 🇺🇦 future as a free and independent nation is equally important to both Europe and the United States. I'm glad to see this understanding gaining ground in Washington. #Ukraine #Independence #USEuropeRelations #UA #EU #US

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Hans Erdmann Jul 19

Peace and Understanding! ( Ringo Star comment! Hope he is with us soon!)