I am fed up with adverts from authoritarian states

This week, I’ve been getting some wonderful adverts on YouTube. No more adverts for Muslim singles in my area or why Grammarly is the solution to all my writing problems. I particularly miss being told that now is the best time to invest in Bitcoin or how I can make $10,000 a day with a simple trick that involves a spatula. Instead, these bits of drivel have been replaced with advertisements from brands that get me, like the Turkish and Polish governments.

It’s not that these governments have authoritarian streaks so wide it’s as if they’ve let a toddler with cholera loose in their underwear, and it’s not that they have a fetish for rewriting history that makes Big Brother look like the only thing he enjoys is lights-out eyes-closed missionary; as always, the thing that makes me empathise with these brands is their product.

From the Turks, it’s the invasion of Kurdish occupied Afrin. This is my jam. It’s the continued oppression of one of the largest and unfortunately geographically incoherent ethnic groups in the whole of the Middle East that have taken a kicking from every single one of the countries in which they are resident. In Turkey they’re arrested, in Iraq they were gassed, and in Syria they were massacred. Luckily, whoever organises the YouTube adverts is happy to ignore this and ram on something that would only appeal to rabid Ottoman fans.

The Polish are, of course, doing wonderful things at the moment. I’m a big fan of taking away freedom from the judiciary, but what they advertised on YouTube was right up my alley: they have taken the action of denying that any Poles were involved in the wholesale slaughter of Eastern European Jewry. Finally, someone is approaching this topic with the sensitivity of an artillery barrage on the Somme, and completely ignoring the complex moral problem that occupation and collaboration posed, just like the rest of occupied Europe! A whole section of history that is completely ignored, all for the benefit of the moral scruples of a new blind generation.

Why am I getting these adverts, YouTube? I am quite frankly not interested in these petty tyrants attempting to justify themselves in the face of widespread condemnation from the West and indeed anyone with a brain. Please remove them and bring back Poppy the psychic. Everything she said was comforting and kind. And didn’t disturb me at all.