Context
The Trump administration classified the Italian hacktivist group Autistici / Inventati as a terrorist organisation[1], meaning that American companies could no longer do business with them.
The immediate outcome was the closure of their Paypal account used for donations, and the loss of one of their .org domains, which is managed by the Public Interest Registry, an American non-profit company.
Before that, that administration retaliated against International Criminal Court Judge Nicolas Guillou and former EU commissioner Thierry Breton as well as four of his collaborators by sanctioning them, which essentially cut them off American services likes bank processors and parcel delivery, among other things.
My questions
Given that most Europeans are not activists nor political figures, how likely do you think it is to happen to individuals? Do you believe that Trump could use sanctions and embargos against the entire EU or some of its countries as leverage? The rational part of me thinks no, but we have seen so much crazy shit since his mandate started that my anxious side leans yes.
Personally, I have been trying to reduce my reliance on US tech and companies for the past two years, because really, the US cannot longer be trusted. And maybe I am overreacting, but I’ve got myself a .eu domain to replace the .com I use for self-hosting.
Funny thing about that. The famous poem actually starts “first they came for the communists”, because that’s what happened historically.
Okay, but maybe that doesn’t count because they came for the communists before 1933, when Germany was still a liberal democracy. Besides, communism and socialism and trade unions are all political choices, they’re not minority identities. They don’t count.
Well, in that case it would be “first they came for the queers”. They didn’t even get a line in the poem for some reason, but they should have. The Nazis treated queer people worse sooner than Jews. Destruction of gathering sites, book burnings, murders, mass imprisonment, attempted genocide, whatever category of mistreatment you consider it by, queers were hit before Jews. And this all started rolling out in 1933, just after the Nazis gained power.
The idea that the Nazis came for the Jews first is a very deliberate liberal-imperialist lie, an attempt to erase every part of Nazi oppression that western imperialists also enjoy partaking in.
Because that’s the unfortunate truth. There is no line separating our societies from fascist ones. No moment you read the news and go “oh my god they’re doing something they’ve never done before”. Because they are already treating so many people horribly and we do not speak out. From the slaves that make our products to the migrants escaping regions our militaries keep unstable.
Either you wait until it’s too late and the fascists come for you, or you fight against liberal imperialism. Those are your only options.
I think you took my “first” as a literal “the very first group”, I’m just trying to say they start going after some groups and then more and more groups of people.
Thank you for this comment! I guess we will only have sufficient backlash, when they come for all the ones that are quiet now. But by then we will already have lost the queer, the jews, the refugees ind so many others.
This. Fascists wer funded by the capital and quite a chunk of the liberal and “christian democracy” scene were find and dandy with then rounding up communists.