When propaganda meets a fresh wound, it creates an image that is almost surreal.

Fireworks are not a symbol of celebration here; they are a message.
The message that nothing has happened.
The message that we are steadfast and victorious, that power and collective space are in our hands.
And the message that we can cover truth, rewrite collective memory, and that you too would do better to forget.

For authoritarian governments, the best citizens are not loyal citizens but citizens who have lost the boundary between truth and false narrative—an idea rendered here through Arendt. The ideal citizen for such governments is one for whom the border between truth and falsehood is always blurred, because this ambiguity is an effective narcotic that guarantees society’s passivity before catastrophe, corruption and crime even more securely than loyalty does.

In this surreal performance, the collision between people’s cries of anger from within their private spaces and the sound of fireworks is not the encounter of two opposing sounds. It is the collision of two rival narratives that have reached a historical point of open rupture.

The cries from people’s homes are the sound of insisting upon truth and declaring that we have not forgotten. They are loud acts of witnessing and a rupture with the official narrative.

The official narrative seeks to return to a state in which nothing happened and to rewrite collective memory, while people resist within the space available to them. One side seeks to construct an image of stability; the other reveals the depth of the instability beneath that image.

These cries are the song of awakening of a people unwilling to relinquish truth, a people for whom the boundary between truth and falsehood is clearer than ever. Their cries are a living collective poem. Nor are these cries merely protest; they are a message: we are awake and we will not return to sleep.

Between these two rival narratives only one will remain. Between the narrative of the people and that of the rulers, it is clear which narrative will endure and write collective memory.