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Dictatorships cooperate. Democracies must cooperate even more closely. Our security depends on the strength of our alliances. As Prime Minister-designate, I want a strong #Romania in the #EU and #NATO: a country that protects its citizens, honours its commitments and helps shape #Romania #EU #NATO #RO #EU #NATO

My comparison is deliberately stark: HAMAS ≠ Palestinian civilians. I draw a historical analogy between Hamas and a dictatorship that drags the population under its rule into catastrophic war—and between Palestinian civilians in Gaza and German civilians suffering in Dresden in https://t.co/VWujQoYHSX #Gaza #Hamas #PalestinianCivilians #Thetweetmentionsthefollowingcountries:PS(Palestine) #DE(Germany). Sothecountrycodesare:PS #DE.

Wie werkelijk de oorlogskoorts wil stoppen, moet demonstreren voor de Russische ambassade, omdat Nederland zich moet verdedigen tegen een sociopathische dictator en moet kiezen voor een echte vrede die meer steun voor Oekraïne en defensie-uitgaven vereist. #Vrede #Oorlogskoorts #Defensie

Hungary is descending into a Stalinist dictatorship. The dictator @magyarpeterMP is having the police grab politicians who oppose him and putting them in jail. This is happening in an EU country. It is truly shocking. This is coming to other EU countries if its not stopped. 🇭🇺 #Hungary #Dictatorship #EU #HU #EU

IRAQ LIBERATION WAS A SUCCESS 🇮🇶 My position is clear: the fall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in 2003 was a historic achievement. U.S.-led forces entered Iraq in March 2003, Baghdad fell in April, and sovereignty was transferred to an Iraqi interim government in June 2004. https://t.co/OuLRltL3iv #IraqLiberation #SaddamHussein #USMilitarySuccess #IQ

Onder de kop ‘Turkije voert oorlog tegen het Westen en Israël’ werd Erdogan door David Weinberg van de zionistische denktank Misgav in The Jerusalem Post een ‘radicale, antisemitische, kwaadaardige antiwesterse dictator’ met ‘jihadistische’ aspiraties genoemd. #Turkije #Israël #Erdogan

The new Hungarian dictator is being charged with getting drunk, getting into an argument with a guy at a bar, stealing his phone and throwing it in the river. @magyarpeterMP doesn’t even deny he did it. How is such an unstable person a Prime Minister in an EU country!? 🇭🇺 #Hungary #Dictatorship #EULeadership #HU

Periodistas de Madrid, que cubren las noticias del Madrid, trabajando en varios medios nacionalmadridistas de Madrid y no saben quién es Anas Laghari. Pero sin embargo lo saben todo del rival a más de 600 kilómetros. Periodismo hooligans, sectario, servicial y dictatorial. #Periodismo #Madrid #Noticias

I accuse Josip Broz Tito and his communist regime of genocide. I reject every attempt to romanticize or glorify his dictatorship. The post-war killings and repression associated with Bleiburg and the death marches, Tezno, Kočevski Rog, Huda Jama and Macelj, together with https://t.co/RrGMaDGIdd #Tito #Genocide #HistoricalTruth #HR #SI

The Return to Feudalism in 21st Century Garb A simple observer's viewpoint, with no claim to hold any absolute truth. The Veneer Cracks There is something strangely archaic about the world unfolding before our eyes, despite its satellites, artificial intelligence, and promises of infinite progress. Here and there, we witness heads of state behaving like feudal lords of another age, patiently nibbling away at the neighboring territory, redrawing borders through force rather than law, as if governing a nation mattered less than expanding one's fiefdom. No names need be mentioned here: current events provide plenty of illustration, and each reader will recognize, according to their own geography and moment of reading, the faces that embody this observation. But this return to the archaic is not confined to grand geopolitical stages. It also permeates the most ordinary daily life—that of social media, where anyone can pour out venom against another without filter, without form, and often without the slightest argument. The verbal jousting of yesteryear, with its codes, its rhetoric, its tacit limits, has given way to raw invective, snap judgment, instant condemnation. We no longer debate: we execute, verbally—and sometimes it doesn't stop at words. The Vanished Inhibition What strikes one, in this dual observation—macro-political and micro-social—is the lifting of an inhibition we thought firmly anchored. Centuries of cultural construction, education, philosophy, sometimes religion, had patiently shaped mechanisms of restraint: politeness as social ritual, argumentation as a mode of resolving disagreement, respect for one's opponent as the very foundation of democratic debate. This civilizational veneer, however fragile it always was, seemed to hold. Today it is cracking, and the question—which for me remains a simple hypothesis, not a certainty—is why. A convenient explanation would blame social media: anonymity, the distance of the screen, the instantaneousness of publication would favor verbal acting-out without the usual mediation of reflection. This is probably true, but likely insufficient. For technology here is only an accelerant, an amplifier—not necessarily a root cause. A Poorly Formatted Neocortex? The more unsettling hypothesis—and I frame it explicitly as hypothesis, not scientifically established fact—is that of a failure in the formation of moral judgment and tolerance toward otherness. The human brain possesses the neural structures enabling empathy, the distancing of impulsive reaction, the acceptance of difference—but these capacities are not innate in their full exercise: they must be built, educated, cultivated, like a muscle that needs patient training from childhood onward. If this education in otherness, nuance, and tolerance of disagreement erodes—for multiple and undoubtedly complex reasons that are not mine to settle here—then older reflexes resurface: instinctive distrust of the stranger outside the clan, the law of the strongest, the logic of territorial or symbolic predation. The other ceases to be a possible interlocutor and becomes once again a potential threat, unless they belong to my tribe, my clan, my party, my digital bubble. Two Scales, One Logic What is striking, in this deliberately provocative reading, is the structural similarity between these two scales. The leader who invades a neighbor in the name of a rediscovered greatness or a reinvented historical right, and the anonymous internet user who insults a stranger in the name of an unnegotiable conviction, may obey the same underlying grammar: that of territory to defend, clan to protect, the other to subdue or exclude rather than understand. The form has changed—satellites instead of horses, tweets instead of heralds—but the substance, in this reading that remains mine alone and commits no one else, seems strangely identical to that of feudal rivalries: the absence of a recognized third party, of an accepted common rule, of a respected arbitrating authority. Everyone becomes judge and party, lord of their own digital or territorial fiefdom. A Civilization on a Knife's Edge Norbert Elias, in his Civilizing Process, showed how Western societies had historically built, with remarkable slowness, an increasing control over impulses and direct violence, in favor of more sublimated forms of social regulation. What we may be observing today—and I stress again the conditional—is a form of regression in this process, or at least a fragilization of the veneer it had patiently laid down. Should we see this as an effect of great technological accelerations, which shake up our cognitive rhythms without leaving education time to adapt? A deeper crisis of the institutions tasked with transmitting these values of tolerance—school, family, religion, the rule of law? Or simply a cyclical movement of human history, where phases of policed civilization alternate with darker backlashes? I have no certain answer, and I would be wary of anyone claiming to hold one. In Conclusion, a Shared Concern This text is only a viewpoint, necessarily partial and subjective, on a world that sometimes seems to replay ancient logics in new clothing. Perhaps I am wrong to perceive a continuity between the feudal lord and the contemporary dictator, between the anonymous online insult and the absence of education in nuance. Perhaps these phenomena are unrelated, or too complex to be thus summarized. But if this reading, even partially, hits the mark, then the question that arises is less one of technological regulation—though necessary—than the far more arduous question of how to rebuild, generation after generation, this capacity to accept the other in their difference, to debate without destroying, to coexist without necessarily dominating. This undertaking, if it exists, will not be resolved by an algorithm nor by an international treaty. It plays out, patiently, in the most elementary education—the one that teaches a child that the other is not a threat, but a possibility. Bibliography Elias, N. (1939). Über den Prozess der Zivilisation [The Civilizing Process]. Oxford: Blackwell (Eng. trans. 1978-1982). Lorenz, K. (1963). Das sogenannte Böse [On Aggression]. London: Methuen (Eng. trans. 1966). Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Han, B.-C. (2013). Im Schwarm [In the Swarm: Digital Prospects]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Eng. trans. 2017).

It looks like people in Hungary are already getting tired of wacky dictator @magyarpeterMP’s antics. A prosecutor is trying to push ahead with charging him for an outstanding theft from 2024. The eurolib faction under @_OrbanAnita is no doubt waiting in the wings to takeover. 🇭🇺 #Hungary #dictatorship #politics #HU

Esta fue la cara de Delcy Rodríguez y de la delegación del régimen dictatorial de Venezuela mientras el presidente Trump decía que arrestaron a Maduro y que ahora "al vencedor le pertenece el botín" en referencia al petróleo. https://t.co/KBNawEmhh0 #Venezuela #DelcyRodríguez #Maduro

Doi jurnaliști care au fugit din Rusia descriu în noua lor biografie despre Putin faptul că războiul din Ucraina este un mijloc de a se menține la putere și oferă un portret înfricoșător al dictatorului rus, evidențiind climatul de teamă și violență instaurat de acesta. #Putin #jurnalismDeInvestigație #Rusia

Romania is under dictatorship. Romania must right back. It's now or never. Călin Georgescu is innocent. This is a matrix attack. Călin Georgescu is the rightful president of Romania. 🇷🇴⚠️ https://t.co/TOnbpvQ6h1 #România #dictatură #Libertate