Trump said “I don’t need international law.” Hegseth calls rules of engagement “stupid.”
The new letter signed by over 100 experts acknowledges these quotes and then proceeds as if restating the rules of war louder will matter. I’m reminded of the early warnings of Haile Selassie about Mussolini, which obviously went unheeded. The whole thing is an appeal to a framework that fascist leaders explicitly repudiate.
Selassie’s 1936 League of Nations address is an exact historical parallel: a direct appeal to an international body that had already demonstrated it would not act. The outcome was catastrophic. We know, right? Mussolini showed us what’s next, right?
Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) with Brigadier Daniel Arthur Sandford on his left and Colonel Orde Wingate on his right, in Dambacha Fort after it had been captured, 15 April 1941
Let me put it in simpler context. The letter correctly lists violations. But who acts? The ICC? Trump targeted and sanctioned ICC officials to prevent this. The Security Council? Trump doesn’t believe in the UN but he is set up with a veto. The letter’s final section vaguely invokes Common Article 1 obligations on allies but never names a single ally, a single concrete action, a single consequence. “We urge”? That is not enforcement.
And there’s a gap in the analysis. Iran’s internet shutdown, Israel’s broadcast ban, Gulf states arresting citizens, FCC threatening US broadcasters. That’s the “Nixonian” operational reality this letter completely ignores. How does anyone enforce a law if they can’t document violations? Trump recently installed two Nixonian operatives to poison and destroy official communications.
It’s interesting that Congress is never mentioned in the letter. Wouldn’t domestic power be the usual answer to stop a democratic leader? The War Powers Resolution is never mentioned. Federal courts are never mentioned. If Trump openly says international law is a dead letter to the executive, the only remaining check is domestic. Yet the letter doesn’t touch it. To me this suggests loss of faith in American checks and balances, post-democracy, and thus it’s an appeal to the world for rescue.
However, the letter doesn’t rise to international enforcement because it seems overly focused on a tone problem. Trump asserts that the US president is above international law as a matter of constitutional authority. The letter says Trump’s statements are “alarming rhetoric” and “disrespect for norms.” But it isn’t just rhetoric. His words are chaotic, self-contradictory and random at best. They deserve little focus. His actions are the many crimes.
What’s really been happening is the systematic elimination of domestic enforcement of international law obligations. The only people inside the US government who could have flagged violations in real time all have been fired. That’s not a small consideration. That’s the whole ballgame. And yet the letter says it has “concerns about institutional safeguards”: removing JAGs, abolishing civilian protection teams, and gutting the law of war manual references from the NDS. Without those, what’s left? Game over.
And that brings us back to the historical perspective completely absent from the letter. When a powerful militant state openly declares itself unbound, and no one enforces, the bad behavior accelerates. The letter fails to state what they see happening when their appeal fails. It already has, as Selassie would say.
The real question, which the letter should have started with, is which allies are complicit and what domestic institutions have abdicated? Or to put it more clearly, now that all the guardrails are behind us, what prevents the world from repeating what comes next? The institution getting all the funding is the one committing the violations.
Trump told guests. “We can’t take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military….”
CNN ran an Easter feature on Tom Holland, the British pop historian who wrote Dominion and now tours the American evangelical circuit as their favorite secular validator. The headline promises a “brush with the supernatural.” The article delivers something more instructive: a case study in what happens when a thesis is tailored to its paying audience.
Holland went to Sinjar in 2016, where ISIS had massacred Yazidis by the hundreds. Men executed. Women sold into slavery. The stench of decomposing bodies so overpowering he doubled over on camera. His takeaway: a cross was still standing above the rubble. It moved him. Financially. The dead Yazidis didn’t get a second thought as he walked through them towards his personal savior plans.
Booze for the Alcoholics
Holland’s thesis in Dominion is that Western values like compassion, equality, and human rights are Christian inventions. Secular people hold Christian beliefs without knowing it. The argument has a problem and a function, and the function explains why nobody talks about the problem.
The problem is that the thesis is false. Buddhist ethics developed sophisticated frameworks for compassion and non-harm five centuries before Christ. Jewish law codified obligations to the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable long before Paul wrote his first letter. Confucian reciprocity predates Christianity by the same margin. Islamic jurisprudence built an entire legal architecture around human dignity. Holland ignores ALL of it. A historian who omits most of human civilization from his thesis about most of human civilization is not doing history. He is doing something else.
The function is flattery. The Southern Baptist Seminary president calls Holland’s premise “fairly unassailable.” American evangelicals get a credentialed British intellectual telling them their religion invented morality. Holland gets the audience, the debate invitations, the YouTube clips, the Easter profiles. Booze for the alcoholics. Delivered in a posh accent with a PBS shine.
The same CNN writer who profiled Holland for Easter published a piece three months ago that documents Christianity’s central role in the KKK, slavery, and colonial genocide. The Holland thesis requires amnesia from the people telling it.
The Content Creator in the Foxhole
Holland’s own faith statements reveal how thin the performance is. “There are times where I can feel that I believe it. There are times when I don’t feel it at all.” His mother tells CNN “he never quite acknowledges it.” He says belief makes “the universe more interesting.” This is not faith. It is aesthetic consumption.
He cites R.S. Thomas as his spiritual touchstone. Any reader of Thomas knows what that means. Thomas was the poet of God’s absence, unanswered prayer, the empty church. His life’s work was the theology of divine silence. Holland cited him as a branding reference in a CNN puff piece. If Holland understood what Thomas was actually writing about, he would not have brought him up.
Holland himself invokes the foxhole cliché. Diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2021, he prayed at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. The cancer hadn’t spread. His brother connected him with a specialist. He now calls it a possible “Marian miracle” while conceding he can’t “100 percent say it’s a coincidence.” His brother’s phone call saved him. He credited the Virgin Mary.
Serious people have examined what happens to faith in actual foxholes. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein published After Auschwitz in 1966 and founded an entire field of theology on one premise: after the Holocaust, belief in a God who acts in history is intellectually indefensible. Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, wrote The Trial of God with God as the defendant. The people who endured genocide concluded God was absent or dead. Holland walked through a genocide site and saw a camera angle.
The Honest Version
Christianity did reshape Western moral frameworks. That much is defensible, and Holland deserves credit for stating it plainly. Where the argument collapses is in calling it revelation rather than what the historical record shows it to be: power technology.
After 1945, British occupation forces deployed church networks across Germany to deprogram a generation raised on Nazi ideology. Christianity was the available operating system that could overwrite the previous one. The British didn’t evangelize the Hitler Youth because they believed. They did it because it worked. Christianity spread through colonization for the same reason. Empires used it because it was effective, and its effectiveness is what Holland is actually documenting.
An honest version of Holland’s thesis would say: Christianity became the dominant moral framework of the West because it was backed by cruel militant empires of history trying to obliterate other faiths, for profit. That is a serious historical argument. But it would empty his bleachers, so he wraps the same insight in a conversion narrative and sells it as mystery. The stench from Holland is almost too much to bear.
CNN calls this a story about faith. It’s a story about supply and demand. And if Holland actually believes what he now claims to believe, he should worry. He declared himself a Christian, then used the faith to sell snake oil to the faithful. By his own adopted theology, that’s the kind of thing they send you to hell for.
Way back in 1995, Bryan Singer gave us a special decoder key to video-based information.
He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real.
Keyser Söze was the invisible supervillain. The menace was the ethnic ambiguity itself. He was Turkish yet German. Dark yet light.
The devil’s trick is that he walks among us, nobody can see him.
Thirty years later, German streaming is moving this aesthetic logic mainstream and into the realm of direct statements. The sorting is the same, while the old dogwhistles are turning into fire alarms.
The Dog Show
Take Eat Pray Bark on Netflix for example. It is supposedly a lightweight comedy about eccentric dog owners attending a training camp in the Austrian Alps. The guru is framed as a mythological God, tall, blond, blue-eyed fair-skinned man named Rúrik Gíslason. Every character in the film regularly salivates over him. Literally, their tongues hang out and the screen pauses as they are struck by his blonde haired blue eyed Godliness. He is framed as a kind of Nordic oracle. Wisdom flows from his hairless body and carved cheekbones.
And then, there is the character of Hakan.
Played by Kerim Waller, an Austrian actor with a Turkish first name, he has hazel eyes, brown hair, and a bearded dark complexion. Hakan is quiet. Hakan is closed off. His line is literally “people are scared of me”. The other characters are regularly positioned as visibly uncomfortable around him. Even the mythical God who can do anything pauses, fails, and gives up trying to help Hakan.
Then, Hakan pulls out a police ID. And everyone relaxes. He’s welcomed, as if a magic token of acceptance was presented.
This is the bizarre scene that started me counting. In America, pulling out a police badge to reveal concealed authority only escalates tension. In this German comedy, it abruptly resolves all fears of Hakan. The badge functions obviously as a German whitening mechanism. The state vouches for a swarthy man. He must be ok, trusted now. You can stop being afraid of the beard because, police.
Just to be clear, the whole time that this guy would enter a scene I couldn’t understand why people acted like he was the devil. In American terms, he looks like the typical average dressed, calm, regular guy you’d see anywhere. Here’s what I’m talking about. Source: Eat Pray Bark, Netflix
But the message being broadcast by German Netflix, apparently, is not that this is a normal friendly Joe. They emphasize the inversion using the hero of the story, a completely hairless body, scrubbed like a baby, topped with a wild blonde mane and a beard so thin it could be a rat tail. Source: Eat Pray Bark, Netflix
Think about the images in American terms: Top guy is almost invisible he’s so regular. The bottom guy is attention-seeking, biker gang, drug dealer, human trafficker. To put it another way, as a security professional in the Bay Area, the bottom guy aesthetic is nearly identical to one of the largest drug dealers of San Francisco, who I ran into at a sushi bar one afternoon, not long before he was nearly stabbed to death.
Now for comparison, consider what seems to be the opposite in the German Netflix framing: Top guy is quiet, attention-avoidant, street gang, drug dealer, human trafficker. The film even scripts him into talking about his crime-filled life and security work on the edge, the death of his brother in a robbery gone bad. Meanwhile, the bottom guy becomes a superman, mythical god-like, demanding everyone’s attention in his wet pants.
And to be fair, it might not be an American versus German cultural parsing. Imagery of hairless men with large breasts who wet their pants has been heavily promoted recently by RFK Jr, if you see what I mean here:
Source: YouTube
A friend then mentioned they were enjoying the new Netflix series called Unfamiliar. A quick look and I saw a swarthy Jew was cast as the villain, while the “Nordic” German man was cast as the hero. The emojis my friend sent were notable when I pointed out the encoding. He couldn’t believe it as I explained how it worked. And once he could see, he said he could SEE. He even seemed a bit disappointed that he didn’t see before I explained what to look for. That got me thinking. I wondered if we should test the decoder key more broadly with Netflix. Pulling one thread started to unravel a much larger issue.
The decoder works not because anything sophisticated is going on. The opposite. It’s just a method like spotting animal camouflage in the wild. Do you see the praying mantis? First you don’t, then you do. Remember the fear of the devil who walks among us? Are you more or less comfortable knowing someone can train to spot disinformation in video productions?
Simply put, I studied disinformation history and it trains the eyes and ears. Disinformation expertise is literally useful everywhere, all the time, because we are swimming in IT these days. Did I just show you my police badge? Did it work?
Quick Back-of-Napkin Count
I scanned through casting data of 28 German-language Netflix productions from 2017 to 2026. I read 93 named cast entries. I classified each actor by name origin and documented heritage, and each role by type: protagonist, antagonist, or supporting.
The results:
Actor Name Origin
Protagonist
Antagonist
Antagonist Rate
Germanic
33
6
13%
Turkish/Arabic/Persian
6
7
27%
Jewish/Sephardic
0
1
50%
Slavic/Eastern European
2
1
14%
Romance/Western European
3
1
20%
All Non-Germanic
11
10
25%
Germanic-named actors get protagonist roles more than double the rate of Turkish/Arabic-named actors. When Turkish or Arabic actors do lead a show, their character is still a criminal. Kida Khodr Ramadan played the Arab clan boss in 4 Blocks. Then he played the Arab enforcer Rami in Netflix’s Crooks.
Same face, same purpose, different show.
Frederick Lau played the Germanic undercover cop in 4 Blocks. Then he played the Germanic safecracker hero in Crooks.
Kren directed both 4 Blocks and Crooks, while the 4 Blocks writing team went on to create Kleo. The fact that Ramadan moved from one show’s Arab boss to another show’s Arab enforcer while Lau moved from Germanic cop to Germanic hero, is what we can call proof that this isn’t coincidence. There’s a repeating institutional practice across productions.
There’s a curated pipeline, an information doctrine.
Laundering Method
There is a secondary pattern in the character names. When non-Germanic actors are given protagonist roles, they receive maximally Germanic character names. The system scrubs the foreignness off them before it lets them lead.
Alexandra Maria Lara is Romanian. She plays “Ursula” in Eat Pray Bark. Jeanne Goursaud is French. She plays “Sara Wulf” in Exterritorial. Devrim Lingnau is German-Turkish. She plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria in The Empress. The most Germanic character imaginable.
When actors are cast as villains, the opposite happens. The character names stay ethnically marked. Hassan Al-Walid. Behzat Aygün. Rami. Josef Koleev. Hakan. The names signal foreignness. The audience is told who to trust and who to fear before a word of dialogue is spoken.
Unfamiliar All Too Familiar
When I was shown Netflix’s Unfamiliar, the biggest German-language spy thriller of 2026, I saw Finzi cast as Josef Koleev. The Russian mastermind. The high-ranking foreign threat. The antagonist.
Samuel Finzi is one of the most celebrated stage actors in the German-speaking world. Decades of awards. Deutsches Theater. Berliner Ensemble. Volksbühne. Critics’ polls have named him the favorite of the German-speaking scene. He is Jewish, and his father’s name is Itzhak Fintzi. A Bulgarian, born in Plovdiv.
Felix Kramer, born in East Berlin, plays opposite him as the German protagonist. The hero. This gets interesting because it shows a system isn’t sorting by actual complexion. It’s the thing that made my friend struggle to parse the information. Kramer and Finzi may be within a shade of each other. The system is sorting by name, by heritage signal, by who gets the Germanic wife and the Germanic surname and the protagonist arc, and then curating them with cinematography.
Source: Unfamiliar
Germany’s most decorated stage actor takes the villain role. The casting directors may not know or think about Finzi’s Jewishness. Finzi maybe doesn’t either. What viewers end up seeing is that he is the swarthy man. That is actively translated into German “foreignness”, making his Jewish-Balkan features a foundational aspect. Nobody had to articulate it for it to be real.
Source: Unfamiliar
Look at how they are portrayed. The villain is bathed in darkness. Shadows cutting across the face, low lighting, shot from slightly below. Classic villain framing. Meanwhile Kramer above is on the boat in daylight, next to a blonde, with the Oberbaumbrücke behind him. Berlin landmarks, natural light, open water. Hero framing.
The camera itself is swarthifying Finzi and lightening Kramer. The complexion difference is manufactured in post-production and cinematography, not just inherited from the actors’ faces. The mise-en-scène tells you who to fear before the script does.
What About a Control Case?
Dark, the most acclaimed German Netflix series ever made, ironically has no ethnic villain coding of darkness at all. The cast is almost entirely Germanic. The story is set in a homogeneous fictional town. There is no complexion entered into the screen to sort, so the sorting system activates by removing all the possibilities.
The pattern appears only when non-Germanic actors enter the cast. German storytelling is fine, yet it brings context that may not be. Ask what happens when German casting frames a dark face into a particular role.
Systematic Aesthetic
We shouldn’t move from what’s observable into wondering if someone overtly said “cast swarthy people as villains”. That is not how aesthetic systems work. They work most often through inheriting, and then emphasizing, the ugly yet easy defaults. Existing bias is a “feels right” moment without anyone asking why that bias feels right, in a self-perpetuating unchallenged environment. The blond guru is scripted to radiate wisdom, and when he turns out to be a fraud, he’s immediately redeemed for it, inherently absolved of guilt. The swarthy loner radiates threat. A police ID resolves his threat, because it’s externally applied validation. A Germanic character name resolves the foreignness.
These don’t have to be decisions, because they have been embedded to more conveniently make them into reflexes.
The word for what this system sorts against is not “race” in the American sense. That would make people racist, and they don’t want to be that. It is not “ethnicity” in the bureaucratic sense. That would mean ethnic groups have a complaint. This is a move into the integrity fog of complexion. Swarthy. Dark. The same word the show is named after, though the show itself never had to confront what it is conveying to audiences.
In 1995 the devil was played up as Turkish and German. In 2026 the German devil is the strong and silent type that appears… swarthy. The logic has not changed much. The casting system wants the audience to believe it is just watching light story-telling, when something much darker has been going on.
In this sixth week of war, as Iran has missiles flying all over the place. Oracle announced an outage and now this:
Iranian strikes have rendered two Amazon Web Services availability zones “hard down” in Dubai and Bahrain and the company expects them to be “unavailable for an extended period,” according to internal Amazon communication reviewed by Big Technology.
Within Amazon Web Services, the strikes have rendered so much damage that employees have been advised to deprioritize both regions.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
