police state

Greater Middle East

Demand Saudi Arabia release detained cyber-dissidents

A group of 40 rights organizations issued a joint statement calling on authorities in Saudi Arabia to release all those unfairly jailed for their online activities before Riyadh hosts the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in December. The organizations stated that the detentions contradict the IGF’s stated values of advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age. They charged that Saudi authorities are subjecting citizens to unprecedented repression, including decades-long prison sentences for expressing critical views online. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Watching the Shadows

Is Elon Musk unstoppable?

If elected president in November, Donald Trump says he will create a government efficiency commission led by tech billionaire Elon Musk as part of his economic plan. Musk suggested the idea to Trump in a conversation on X, which he bought in 2022 when it was called Twitter. The announcement is the latest display of Musk’s growing influence in politics. The self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” is accused of censoring progressive opinions while amplifying the voices of far-right networks. So far, no one seems to be able to check his growing power, as his recent legal battles with Australia and Brazil have demonstrated. Both countries tried to curtail content deemed harmful, but Musk ignored their requests. After Musk disregarded a judicial order to suspend dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation in Brazil, the country’s Supreme Court ruled to ban it nationwide. Journalists, who have relied heavily on it, have expressed a mixture of relief and regret at the ban. (Photo: Filip Troníček via Wikipedia)

Watching the Shadows

Podcast: rage against the technocracy II

Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence continue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being used as conduits for propaganda and disinformation lubricating the reconsolidation of dictatorships. This is all about to get much worse—with propaganda especially getting exponentially more sophisticated—through the advent of artificial intelligence. What is urgently mandated—ultimately, even to be able to effectively oppose genocides and dictatorships—is a revolution of everyday life, reclaiming human reality from digital totalitarianism. The uprising in El Salvador against the mandatory imposition of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 still stands as a glimmer of hope, pointing the potentiality of this kind of revolution—even if the aspiring autocrat Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin a national currency, put down the uprising and is now consolidating an authoritarian regime. Bill Weinberg rants against the digital Borg in Episode 242 of the CounterVortex podcast. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: Earth First! Newswire)

Southeast Asia

Cambodia: citizens detained for protesting mega-project

At least 94 people have been arbitrarily arrested in Cambodia since late July for expressing public criticism of the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam Development Triangle Area (CLV-DTA), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. The human rights organizations believe at least 59 of those arrested have been unlawfully detained by Cambodian authorities, and called for all charges in these cases to be immediately dropped. The Khmer Movement for Democracy states that the CLV-DTA would serve “as cover for further illegal deforestation, land evictions, and exploitation of resources for foreign gain.” (Map: PCL)

East Asia

Hong Kong court convicts journalists of sedition

The Hong Kong District Court found Best Pencil Ltd, the parent company of now-shuttered Stand News, along with former chief editors Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, guilty of “conspiracy to publish and/or reproduce seditious publications” under the colonial-era Crimes Ordinance. The case centered on 17 articles the website ran concerning protests, activism and elections. The two editors face up to two years each in prison. Since the crackdown following the 2019 protests, some 10 media outlets have been forced to close in Hong Kong, with over 1,000 journalists thrown out of work. (Photo: HKFP)

East Asia

Nuclear power and the struggle in Guangdong

In Episode 240 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses China’s hubristic plans for massive expansion of its nuclear power sector—and notes that some of the new plants are slated for the southern province of Guangdong, which in recent years has seen repeated outbursts of protest over land-grabs and industrial pollution as well as wildcat labor actions (and was, in fact, the site of a nuclear accident in 2021). China’s expropriated peasant class has been left behind by the breakneck industrialization of the past decades, and may prove a source of resistance to the new thrust of nuclear development that would further accelerate it—despite the current crackdown on dissent. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Map via ResearchGate)

Mexico

Mexico: jurists strike to oppose constitutional reform

Federal judges voted to go on strike across Mexico in protest of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s pending reform of the country’s judicial system. The judges join thousands of other court employees who similarly announced an indefinite strike over the proposed constitutional changes. Under the judicial reform unveiled in February, the number of justices on the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) would be reduced from 11 to nine, and all SCJN justices as well as all judges and magistrates nationwide would be elected by popular vote. Candidates would be appointed by the three “powers” of the state: executive, judicial, and legislative. The reform would also establish a Judicial Discipline Tribunal to investigate jurists for possible corruption. The monitoring group Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) criticized the proposed reform as representing a “setback for human rights” that could consolidate power in the executive and “lead to the continuation and deepening of patterns of impunity and abuse against the population.” (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

New York City

Appeals court rejects challenge to NYC curfews

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of protest curfews in New York City. The curfews, imposed in response to demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, were in force for a one-week period in June 2020. Lamel Jeffrey, Thaddeus Blake and Chayse Pena were each arrested and charged with violating the curfew. In a subsequent lawsuit, they alleged that the city’s protest restrictions violated their First Amendment right to free assembly and their Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful arrest. In 2022, a federal district court dismissed the case, stating that the curfews constituted a valid public safety regulation that “left open ample alternative channels for expressive activity.” The Second Circuit has now upheld this ruling. (Photo: The Village Sun)

North America

Podcast: Tim Walz and the struggle in Minnesota

In Episode 238 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock of the Democratic ticket’s new vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and the role he played as Minnesota governor in two of the major activist struggles in the North Star State over the past years—the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, which began in Minneapolis; and the fight against Line 3, which delivers Canadian shale oil to US markets, and imperils the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe indigenous people. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: Stop Line 3)

Central Asia

Russia: indigenous rights groups designated ‘extremist’

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders released a statement urging Russia to refrain from designating groups advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples and national minorities as “extremist organizations.” The statement follows a decision by Russian authorities a week earlier to thusly classify 55 such organizations. The Ministry of Justice cited a June ruling by Russia’s Supreme Court banning “structural divisions” of the so-called “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement,” which was defined as an “international public movement to destroy the multinational unity and territorial integrity of Russia.” Involvement in the movement may result in a sentence of up to six years in prison—despite the fact that no such movement formally exists. (Photo of Itelmen people in the Kamchatka Peninsula via Wikipedia)

Europe

‘Criminalization’ of climate protests in Europe

European governments have reacted to a growing wave of direct-action protests by climate activists with heavy-handed policing, effectively criminalizing such campaigns, seeking to dissolve groups, and imposing restrictions on basic rights, Human Rights Watch charges. “This creates serious risks to environmental activism and civil society as a whole and undercuts vital efforts to address the climate crisis,” the organization found. The press release was issued the same day a record-breaking sentence was handed down in the United Kingdom, with five Just Stop Oil activists given multi-year prison terms in a case concerning a protest action that disrupted the M25 motorway in London. (Photo: Stefan Müller via Wikipedia)

Africa

West Africa: dissidents detained, disappeared

Amnesty International urged Malian authorities to immediately release dissident Youssouf Daba Diawara and 11 other arbitrarily detained opposition politicians. According to the statement, Mali’s junta has been arbitrarily holding these political figures solely for exercising their civil rights. Diawara was forced from his car by armed men in Bamako and taken to the Gendarmerie’s Criminal Investigations Brigade. He was charged with “opposition to legitimate authority” for participating in a protest against power cuts and inflation. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has also expressed concern over the “disappearance” of activists in neighboring Guinea. Both Mali and Guinea have been led by military juntas since coups d’etat in 2020 and 2021, respectively. (Map: World Sites Atlas)