Archive for dictature
A hundred mirrors shine together, a hundred hubs resonate together!
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags calligraphy, ChatGPT, Chinese Communist Party, committee on the future of ISBA conferences, dictature, ISBA, ISBA 2026, Mao Zedong, Maoist posters, mirror workshop, multi-hub conference, Nagoya, survey, The Hundred Flowers Campaign, traditional Chinese calligraphy on July 2, 2026 by xi'an
far-right violence: digital radicalisation is threatening democracy [The Guardian]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Belfast, democracy, dictature, digital radicalisation, extreme-right, far-right violence, Hope Not Hate, racism, Reform UK, Restore Britain, Russia, social media, Southampton, UK Parliement, UK politics, UK riots on June 17, 2026 by xi'an
An editorial from The Guardian on 10 June, addressing the far-right, racist, and anything but spontaneous, riots in the UK:
Masked men who drive terrorised families out of their homes cannot be called protesters, since the word implies legitimate grievance. The outbreak of racist violence in Northern Ireland this week is connected to the politics of migration, but not in the way that the mob and those who incited it claim. The ostensible trigger was a brutal assault, partially captured on video. A man of Sudanese origin has been charged with attempted murder. The footage was widely shared online. The attack was depicted as part of a wider threat to white Britons by foreign “invaders”. Far-right agitators summoned vengeful crowds. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, was instrumental in this process. So was Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, whose platform helped mobilise racist fury.
Mr Musk habitually intervenes in UK politics. Last year, he addressed a rally organised by Mr Yaxley‑Lennon via video link. He called for the removal of the current government and warned against the threat from “uncontrolled migration”. He told the crowd “You either fight back or you die”. He reposted that line on Tuesday.
Mr Musk shows no interest in the reality of life in the UK, preferring to amplify dystopian myths. Mr Yaxley-Lennon styles himself as a patriot, but his racially charged ultranationalism is hostile to traditions of British pluralism and tolerance. His true ideological affinity is revealed by the trip he made to Moscow last week with the goal, as he put it, of admiring “the beauty of a civilised society”. That is not how most British people would characterise Vladimir Putin’s repressive authoritarian regime, which murders dissidents and invaded a neighbouring democracy to steal its territory.
Mr Yaxley-Lennon doesn’t represent mainstream opinion, but his divisive politics are expanding from the fringe, facilitated by social media algorithms and, in the case of Mr Musk, one especially powerful and ideologically fixated oligarch. The result is a digital ecosystem where moderate conservative opinion has been crowded out by radical nationalism and, on the topic of immigration, a far-right worldview twisted with paranoia and racist hysteria.
Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe act as conduits for that style in mainstream debate, channelling the idiom of the fringe into parliament and on BBC bulletins. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, condemns violent manifestations of anti-immigrant politics but fails to recognise that her own party has abetted the rhetorical vilification that turns minority communities into targets for mob rage. Ms Badenoch also competes for attention in online spaces and in analogue right-leaning media, where politics is a feedback loop of radicalisation. When the economic conditions that incubate extremism are hard to fix, politicians are drawn to collude in the fiction that migration is the root cause and to excuse racism as a normal expression of social discontent.
This process has met far too little resistance from Sir Keir Starmer’s government. The prime minister issues insipid warnings to social media companies to behave responsibly. He condemns racist violence and urges calm on the streets. But he does not properly address the mechanism – the ideological capture of a digital information space – that is undermining social cohesion and sabotaging democracy at a systemic level. A contagious violent strain of far-right politics has been normalised online and is now spreading on to the streets. It needs to be beaten on both fronts.
“We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping”
Posted in Kids, Travel with tags Amnesty International, clerics, dictature, extra-judiciary deaths, Iran, mass killing, military intervention, pro-democracy protesters, theocracy, Trump administration, US politics, Woman Life Liberty on January 16, 2026 by xi'an
human acts (book review)
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags 1980, book review, Chonnam National University, coup d'état, dictature, Gwangju, Gwangju massacre, Gwangju Uprising, Han Kang, Korean democracy, Korean history, Moscow, Nobel Prize in Litterature, Olympics, repression, South Korea, Tehran on October 3, 2025 by xi'an
After reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, I downloaded Human Acts which I found utterly impressive, hence the separate book review. This book gives connected snapshots of the democratisation uprising that happened in May 1980 in Gwangju, Korea, protesting a coup d’état, and of the savage repression that followed. With up to 2000 victims. (I was in my first year at the university at the time and cannot remember the news reaching me, despite being politically active, maybe because this was the year of the US Embassy take-over in Tehran and of the boycott of the Moscow Olympics.) The book is organised around the deaths of neighbours and the impact on their relatives until now. The style is strongly original, with bouts of magical realism like the thoughts of a cadaver inside a pile of corpses gathered by the military forces. The stories are all written from a character’s viewpoint, expressing her or his reasoning for joining the uprising and facing a probable death. I found these texts remarkable and highly moving in producing reconstituted motivations from “everyday” people, with no political agenda but an raw urge to recover democracy after decades of dictature. The original title is A boy comes (소년이 온다), which refers to the initial(isation) story, but the later Human Acts title seems quite appropriate, with its many interpretations and the stress on humanity, despite the horror of the repression.
and it only gets worse and worse and … [verbatim]
Posted in Books, pictures with tags 06 January 2021, Agent Orange, baby Trump, bombing, democracy, dictature, Donald Trump, drawing, elections, Emmanuel Macron, European Commission, European Union, foreign policy, JD Vance, Kyiv, riots, Russian invasion, Solidarity with Ukraine, Ukraine, US Capitol, verbatim, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, war crimes, war economy on March 2, 2025 by xi'an
[Extracts from DT’s unhinged declarations on 19 Feb about Ukraine:]
“But today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine. Well, we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens. You got most of the cities are laying on their sides.”
“Russia does not intend to destroy Kyiv, if they had wanted to, they would have done it. Russia is capable of wiping out Ukrainian cities 100%, including Kyiv, but right now, they are only attacking at 20%.”
“Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism [sic].”
[And more during the joint session with Emmanuel Macron, on 24 Feb.]
“I don’t use those words lightly [when asked whether or not Putin is a dictator], we’ll see how it all works out.”
“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.”
[With the newspeak winner about the January 6 rioters’ pardon]
“I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”
[All these quotes were recorded before the 28 Feb deliberate ambush of President Zelenskyy set by the boned spurred Agent Orange and his hillbilly Iago, reaching the all-times nadir of US international relations…]
