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… read about Modi’s mask-off moment on Israel.

X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has for nearly 17 years provided a way for anyone to publish their immediate reaction to the news in the world, from hot takes to official state pronouncements. While media, in general, gives outsized importance to what happens on Twitter (thanks to the poor online habits of journalists), the speech of governments can carry an outsized impact, which makes it worthy of study. Writing at The India Cable [[link removed]], Rohit Khanna takes particular interest in how India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded to the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel. Modi’s initial statement, issued on the same day, was one of solidarity with Israel against the terrorist attack. A follow-up by the Foreign Ministry and External Affairs Minister made no mention of Palestinian lives lost, a departure from past statements by India. Why is that? “Hardliners have a far greater say on both sides — Hamas, which practically controls Gaza, on one side, and a steady shift towards strongly right-wing governments in Israel, on the other side. Hamas and the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] have been unrelenting in their violence. But even in this deteriorating climate, and despite a definite shift towards Israel by successive Indian governments, India has tried to walk a diplomatic tightrope." Khanna notes that the current Indian response indicates that Modi is shrugging off India's fine balance.

Letters in the Blackout

Before the recent outbreak of violence, the Gaza Strip was home to two million people, with the legal flow of goods [[link removed]] into the strip controlled by Israel. That means fuel enters Gaza from Israel-controlled pipelines, electricity reaches Gaza from wires that stretch from Israel into the strip, and while Gaza has plants to desalinate seawater, without electricity, Gaza’s water comes from pipes controlled by Israel. Before the retaliatory airstrikes began, it would be easy to describe Gazans as living in a state of siege, with the intensity toggled between a captor’s leniency and cruelty. Now, the flow of necessities has been throttled as falling bombs exacerbate the suffering of the living. That makes getting vital aid impossible, and it makes it hard to get witnesses from Gaza out and into the world. Protean Magazine, in partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies, is translating and publishing a series called “ Letters From Gaza [[link removed]].”

“In this war, you’re constantly learning and experiencing new realities. It dawned on me that, during this aggression, my children and I were the only ones left in this building,” reads the middle of a letter from Sama Hassan, which is dated Oct. 11, 2023. Hassan details the ordeal of life during wartime, of too-silent neighbors, of a small kind mercy.

Ahmed Issa, a communications coordinator and father of two, framed his Oct. 14, 2023, letter almost like an obituary. “I have experienced much outside of Gaza, but I have never felt that I belong anywhere else but here,” he writes. “If we were to die, we prefer to die in Gaza. All my family members have agreed that we are staying together and we will not leave. We have suffered a lot, we are resilient and can endure everything, and we will never leave! Even if we know they want to kill us.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Automating Autocracy

YouTube is a jukebox, but one that demands every song be paired with some sort of visual. To facilitate the listening of tracks on YouTube, and with it the viewing of ads, the social media giant has a service that can automatically generate videos for tracks delivered to it by record labels and distributors. While that can be an effortless way for both labels and YouTube to earn money, the automated process also makes YouTube responsible for generating content that can violate its own terms of service, as when hateful nationalist music is uploaded to the site for automatic video generation.

“The music videos themselves are low-budget. Just static images showing Hindu supremacist symbols and cut-out shots of singers. On occasion, they display photos of leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the Hindu nationalist ruling party in India. But the lyrics speak of the slaughter of Muslims and have been chanted at religious rallies, sparking violence [[link removed]],” reports Pooja Chaudhuri for Bellingcat [[link removed]].

While some of the videos identified by Bellingcat have been taken down, after-the-fact moderation is a slow process, and it depends not just on YouTube having enough moderators but enough that speak the relevant languages and are fluent in the conflicts, like Hindutva violence against Muslims in India, to identify and strike the videos. That YouTube makes auto-generating such videos easy, but taking them down harder is a profound limit of social media moderation.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE A Desert Called Peace: Part II

While all war is a brutal business, civil wars especially risk horrific violence, as conflicts between neighbors shatter a social fabric and leave bodies and mistrust in their wake. Given the specific nastiness that comes from conflicts waged within the border of a country, one might expect that precision and restraint will guide the warring forces. What’s the advantage of escalating violence and brutality?

Unfortunately, in “Repression Works (Just Not in Moderation),” Yuri M. Zhukov examines if there is a threshold of violence a government can impose against rebel groups, after which rebel groups stop being able to offer resistance.

Zhukov argues that “what rebels do depends on how much violence the government uses: repression inflames opposition activity at low and moderate levels, but deters it in the extreme. There is a threshold level of violence, at which repression outpaces the opposition’s ability to recover losses.”

Some but insufficient repression, the study suggests, places a government in the worst position of all: Rebel groups will have the capacity to escalate further, and the government will have done too much violence to regain its authoritative hold on the populace.

To see if this hypothesis was supported by observed conflict, Zhukov focused on violence by month and region in Chechnya from May 2000 to March 2012 and then confirmed the findings in data sets of other conflicts for 71 other countries. The Chechnya data set showed 35,130 incidents of government violence and 9451 incidents of rebel violence.

“In an average locality, fewer than one rebel attack occurred in months following no use of government violence, and 18 attacks if the government escalated to 100 operations per month. This number dropped to less than one attack per month where the government was more extreme (250 operations per month),” writes Zhukov.

Rebels, by virtue of fewer resources at the start of a conflict, often have to be more selective in their use of violence. What this illustrates is that, even with the clumsiness of massive force, Russian government forces in Chechnya were able to do enough violence to achieve repression, even when it was inaccurately applied.

“Inefficient force can only maintain its coercive effect if it is so overwhelming that the guilty are punished along with the innocent. Violence is a substitute for information,” writes Zhukov.

Better information for governments, in the form of secret police and surveillance states, can lower the threshold at which a government can achieve sufficient repressive violence. Constraints on speech and freedom of movement limit the ability of people to organize against the repressive actions of a government. So long as effective surveillance and control can be maintained, authoritarian states stand a good chance of resisting violent challenges.

“The purpose of such research, needless to say, is not to advise dictators on how to repress their own people,” concludes Zhukov. “If we are to understand why these acts of unspeakable cruelty happen, it is necessary to examine the incentives their perpetrators face and how their targets are likely to react.”

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FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] RECEIPTS

Marco Werman interviewed [[link removed]] Tanya Hari, executive director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization that works with Palestinians. Hari explained that everything that comes into Gaza requires coordination with Israel. “Everything from baby food to children's toys. All of those items require coordination. And, of course, a long list of items we estimate probably in the thousands would require special coordination, items that were considered to be dual use. That is, they have a civilian and a military purpose. And those items would be restricted and sometimes not let in at all. And they would be vital for a range of institutions, for civilian infrastructure, for health needs, for industry. And those have been severely restricted from coming into Gaza, at least for the past 16 years,” said Hari. Now, there are even tighter controls on what flows into Gaza, including not just goods but restrictions on water and electricity.

Mena Ayazi visited [[link removed]] the Mathare informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, where many internally and regionally displaced youth live. Their conditions are harsh: the informal settlement means many lack sanitation, adequate food, electricity, running water, education, and more. Despite this, youth leaders have done work on water wells, community gardens, and safe spaces for people to share outside the home. “Partnering with young people to solve problems rather than treating them as the beneficiaries of programming or protection helps elevate their agency,” wrote Ayazi, who points to youth-led initiatives, and ones that pay their staff a living wage, as one way forward.

Michael Fox witnessed [[link removed]] an annular eclipse from Sarigua National Park in Panama. Together with spectators, astronomy enthusiasts, and visiting Russian cosmonaut Oleg Atremyev, the crowd used eclipse classes to observe the path of the moon across the face of the sun, with cloud cover giving way in time to see the moon outlined by the solar corona. “This reminds us of the cosmovision of our ancestors," Madelaine Rojas, the country’s first female astrophysicist, told Fox. “How they predicted these types of phenomena that were really important to them. The skies and the celestial bodies were the most important for them.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

Napoleon III (the underwhelming, mid-1800s one) once ordered a battle so brutal that an observer came up with the entire concept of conventions outlining laws of war [[link removed]].

Model UN? More like Model Un-fun [[link removed]]!

Verhoeven considered having the "Would you like to know more?" segments in Starship Troopers formatted as Lisa Frank backdrops [[link removed]] emphasizing misreported horrors to justify future violence but threw it out as "too heavy-handed, we're making a subtle film here."

It’s been 22 years since [[link removed]] I’ve seen a war machine whirr into action this quickly, but the results are here [[link removed]], and they’re deeply tragic [[link removed]].

Despite the sales pitch for sustainable yacht-makers, I would argue that owning a superyacht and environmental consciousness are wholly incompatible [[link removed]].

For your consideration: the no-states solution [[link removed]].

What if the solution to everything is sitting down and ordering some Pizzaballa [[link removed]]?

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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