The Blog "No Pasarán" Has Been Locked and Removed; Google: Put an End to the Censorship

After 21 years on the internet, No Pasarán has been locked and removed, unceremoniously taken down by Blogger. (Many many thanks for the Instalink, Glenn; + if any readers have insight in such matters and know who to contact at Google/Blogger, please write to eriksvane@aol.com.)

For the past weeks, if not months, there has hardly been a day when No Pasarán — which for over two decades has prided itself on being fact-filled and dispassionate, linking adversaries as well as friends — didn't receive a message on my Blogger admin page (to be sure, I can't tell if it's a different post complained about every single day, or the same one stretching over several days) advising about the following:

We have received a DMCA complaint for one or more of your blogs. Emails with the details were sent to you and all affected posts have been reset to "Draft" status (you may find them by selecting "Drafts" on the "Edit posts" page for each of the affected blogs). You may re-publish the posts with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.

This post was unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines.

However, contrary to what Google's message says and as I have complained about before, the above is not what happens anymore. Not for the past two years, at least.

What used to happen is that we indeed would check out the Gmail mailbox to see which post had been reset to Draft status and click on a link saying File a Counter-Claim. By no means do the posts have to be recent: posts as old as ten years have been reset to Draft status and were all — all of them — restored after challenging the complaint.

As Facebook and Amazon and others seem to become less partisan (not to mention X/Twitter) with/after Trump's victory, Google or at least Blogger seem to be going the opposite way… 

A) Contrary to what they write ("Emails with the details were sent to you and all affected posts have been reset to "Draft" status"), that is no longer the case.  Although one gets the message above one never receives the attendant and promised emails in one's email inbox anymore, none whatsoever.

B) And no, the post in question (whichever it is, as I cannot tell without the attendant email) is no longer simply reset to Draft status; The whole thing is outright deleted. I forget whether the entire post vanishes from the admin page or if the post remains, albeit with just the title while the content is blank, with all the text removed. (There is thus no way to recover one's original text — unless one happens to have a previously opened window featuring the blog, as long as said window has not been refreshed.)

C) Even worse. Now, the punishment has been upped even more: previously, the one single post was reverted to "Draft" status; now, Blogger removes not just the one (allegedly) offending post but over 14,000 posts, i.e., the entire 21-year run of the blog (with contents invisible to even the bloggers themselves).

Imagine the anxiety produced here: isn't this like with the Stasi, where you are (barely) told you are under investigation, but you are never told for what, or what your options are, or if they have already decided that you will be punished (already have been?) by losing something intimately personal?

Now the million-dollar question: What caused the latest removal?

As far as I can ascertain, the likeliest cause is the Belgian state's television company: 

As a member of, and spokesman for, Republicans Overseas, I was contacted by the RTBF channel on a month ago for a discussion of Donald Trump's first100 days to give the Republican point of view, albeit with a caveat — one hell of a caveat: 

Of all the people interviewed for the QR section, only one was not allowed to be on the set live, but had his comments prerecorded six to seven hours earlier. Here is what No Pasarán wrote (translated from French), which we didn't send to RTBF's emails and to that of the media watchdog CSA until this Monday.

It is with the utmost indignation that Republicans Overseas (Republicans Overseas France or ROF) protests your April 30th broadcast, during which one of our organization's spokespersons was defamed. He was unable to defend himself since QR Le Débat refused to have him on the RTBF set — which, few would dispute, is unbelievable for a journalistic organization — but insisted on recording his remarks several hours earlier. Consequently, we are forced to add RTBF to the list of untrustworthy European media outlets. We have also advised all members of our organization to no longer accept invitations from RTBF. 

We remind you that Mr. Erik Svane went so far as to offer to use his Miles to pay for a plane ticket from Paris to Brussels out of his own pocket. However, this offer — which can only be described as generous — was immediately rejected, insisting that his participation be pre-recorded via the Skype/Teams app.

That same evening, April 30th, Sacha Daout and Nathalie Maleux hosted a Q&A session on the subject of Trump, les 100 jours qui ont changé NOTRE monde. Everyone was live on the set, with one exception — the only speaker giving the U.S. Republicans' point of view, namely Mr. Svane — whose remarks had actually been recorded six to seven hours earlier. 

When, towards the 55th minute, RTBF played an excerpt of mine answering questions about illegal immigrants, the response was that it was "catastrophic" language and "racist discourse" in addition to, according to no less than a former Belgian prime minister (!), beig reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. This led to ROF's protest. This caused the protest above, along with the attendant No Pasarán post.

If RTBF or Belgium's CSA are behind the removal of the blog, then the conclusion is inescapable: Not content with calling Donald Trump and his followers (American or foreign) racists and Nazis, the Belgian authorities also want to keep any of the above, or anybody at all, from complaining about said ad hominems or just giving their own point of view.

Beyond contacting me (see introductory paragraph), you can also protest at infos@rtbf.be, sospigeons@rtbf.be, questionsreponses@rtbf.be, and info@csa.be — no insults, natch, just references to freedom of speech along with (warrented) protest of ill treatment of conservatives.

Google/Blogger: Kindly restore No Pasarán immediately.