After a Ban of Almost 4 Months, the Blog No Pasarán Has Been Restored to the Internet

I can scarcely believe it.

I am in shock. 

After being banned three to four months ago — 112 days to be exact (during which time I skipped over to NP's sister blog, Le Monde Watch, and blogged there) — No Pasarán has been restored to the internet.

Wednesday, I woke from a nap and turned on my iPhone, planned to click on the Instapundit tag but clicked on the No Pasarán tag next to it instead by mistake. There is supposed to be a blank Google page with the words "Blog has been removed." Instead, I did a double take. "Wait, that's not normal!" The blog was up. Right there — in front of my face. "There's something wrong here!" 

Before I say more and delve deeper into the most stressful summer in memory — and I assume I will be adding to this post and updating it over the next few days — I want to use three sentences to quickly address a key controversy.

As the blogosphere rallied in support of ¡No Pasarán!'s restoration to the Internet, some voices have misunderstood the very title of the blog, going as far as to wonder whether, based on its title (aligned with the Left during the Spanish Civil War), ¡No Pasarán! isn't a pro-communist blog or even a communist blog.

The short answer is No (or, in Spanish, "¡No!") — not at all. On the contrary: appropriating the battle cry of Spain's leftists, the blog was — is! — thumbing its nose at leftists of all stripes — that being, indeed, the blog's raison d'être.

Certainly, if you are familiar with the blog's banner, you would agree that it is highly unlikely that a (pro-)communist would ridicule the famous photo of Che Guevara by having El Che (or, as we called the Dissident Frogman's doctored photo, Mi-Che) wear Mickey Mouse ears on the top of his noggin. 

A far longer answer can be found here: No, "No Pasarán" Is Not a Pro-Communist Blog and Never Was; On the Contrary, Its Mission Is to Denounce Anti-Americans of All Stripes.

Back to the blog recovery. 

I can still scarcely believe it.

I have lots of people to thank (speaking of which, thanks for the Instalink): In no particular order, I would like to extend my deepest thanks for their support to the Republicans Overseas France (ROF) organization in Paris and its members. Stateside, deep thanks are due, over at Instapundit (without which it would have been hard to survive the past two decades), to Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, Sarah Hoyt, Stephen Green, and — last but not least — Gail Heriot. And of course Powerline, Doug Ross, and the ADF. Also to Fausta and Benny Huang, not to mention W2, who was present as a fellow blogger at No Pasarán's birth in 2004. There are many others, but I am still in shock, so forgive me if I left anybody out.  

But above all I owe thanks to Damian Bennett — he provided me with plenty of ammunition and, when I was feeling down and/or fed up with fighting the Google behemoth in California, loads of support. 

Indeed, since I am still in shock, I will let Damian share his experience of Wednesday. If you need a design consultant or posters in the Richmond (Virginia) area, by the way, be sure to consider the designer of these works (check out Damian's portrait reminiscent of that of none other than Che Guevara)…

I was going to wait on ES to spring the news, but he'll probably be on a bender the rest of the week.

STORY BEGIN. Here I was, a quiet overcast afternoon reading about Charlie Kirk being mysteriously murdered by a cis-white male from a solid righty-right Hitlerian Republican MAGA family, Mormon no less, with no clue to motive, when in the midst of my confoundment [our mutual friend] DBH pops up in my inbox -- 

POP!

Poking around on the internet, I came across this link to ¡No Pasarán!

'This' link was 'THE' link and there it was, ¡No Pasarán! as we left it In May plus an auto-scheduled post for D-Day. 

THX to DBH for his sleuthing. Congrats to ES on the David-vs-Google-liath WIN. THX to everyone who lent their support, whether with well wishes and encouragement or following developments at Le Monde Watch or viewing the restoration posters at Bēhance (bonus THX if you hit the blue appreciation button and/or shared the link). THX also to friends of ¡No Pasarán! at Instapundit, Power Line, Doug Ross, Republicans Overseas France, and Alliance Defending Freedom.

If you were a regular ¡No Pasarán! reader of its meaty longer posts, with complex weaving of detailed history and contemporary issues and opinion, when the site was memory-holed the loss was profound. Now imagine the loss for the writer of those posts, then multiply your imagining by 21+ years and the loss is annihilative, psychologically annihilative. Unlike loss of fortune -- fortunes can be rebuilt -- or loss of friends -- new friends can be found -- I know of no writer who could recover the loss of a 21-year corpus of writing. It resembles the loss of a child.

Good news is in short supply these days, and this good news is really just bad news undone, but let's take the win and all go home happy.

Everyone, stay safe.

Thanks, Damian.

So a lot of people have been wondering how on Earth I got the blog back. 

And the answer is: Nobody knows. (Nobody knows for sure, I mean.) I certainly received no message from Google.

So why did it happen? Was it the campaign on the blogosphere? Was it my registered letters to the top echelons both in Mountain View and in their local Paris office? Was it the vaunted First Amendment defense organizations that vowed to take on the behemoth? (Few of them accepted to listen to my case, or even deigned to answer me — which, frankly, was a huge deception, a deception from organizations that I have admired and even lionized on the blog. With one notable exception: the ADF, to which I am, again, eternally grateful.) 

There are a number of theories: The aforementioned Damian Bennett believes that Google is starting to feel the strain of the many lawsuits, not to mention the attacks from the Trump White House on all types of old media and tech giants.

As for myself, I have been wondering if all my working, both on and behind the scenes, didn't do less than my making sure every week to religiously do something as simple as press the "Request Review" button (see screenshot above), which refreshes weekly. Maybe the Blogger crew got tired of me asking for a review so often or perhaps I had to wait until it was the time for someone reasonable to be in charge a particular day, and that right person was on call this week.

In any case: We have been restored and we are back in action. 

This was the (depressing) view one would see every time one tried 
to access the blog No Pasarán. When I clicked onto the blog 
last Wednesday by mistake, I was so shocked to see the blog 
back again, I thought, "Wait, there is something wrong here"