There are family stories you never have to tell out loud because they hum through the walls all by themselves. My grandfather — my pop-pop — tried to outrun a ghost when he moved my nana to the end of a dead-end road in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The plan was simple enough: make it harder for her to walk to the bar, slip down to the corner store, find a bottle. The bottle always finds its way, though. She’d drink anyway, pick up the phone, and dial her fury into the night. Half real, half imagined, all unstoppable — a betrayal she felt in her bones that someone was wronging her husband, wronging the family. You can build a cul-de-sac to trap a body, but a ghost always finds the switchboard.
That’s how it works. Ghosts don’t need doors or windows when there’s a line out. When I was a kid, the soundtrack in my house was the clink of ice cubes against cheap glass. My mother’s whiskey. My father’s gin. It was a marriage held together by daily drinking and a quiet agreement not to talk too much about the ghosts that had come before: Irish, Hungarian, Prague — famine, fascists, beat cops, boarding houses. Maybe they thought the Pacific would drown it all out when they washed up in Hawaii. But the ghosts were patient. They hum under the floorboards and rattle the pipes when you stand too close.
This is what I mean when I talk about manufactured dissent.
It’s not a QAnon meme. It’s not “Russian bots on Facebook.” It’s older and deeper than any click farm. It’s the way old griefs — real ones — get stoked back to flame when someone needs cheap fuel. That’s why I like the coal metaphor. Pain is like buried carbon. We like to pretend we’ve entombed it: the genocide, the forced removal, the plantation, the train car. We build whole new towns on top. We call it progress. But buried carbon is only dormant until someone wants to feed oxygen to the seam.
Take Ukraine. The West spins the bedtime version: a democracy, a tyrant, clear black hats and white hats. But underneath is the coal seam: the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine that starved millions of Ukrainians to death. It’s not a museum piece — it lives. It lives in the stories people whisper about how Moscow will always take your bread and leave your children to rot. That ghost didn’t die in 1933; it waited in the pit until someone knew how to stoke it. The U.S. didn’t invent it — but we sure as hell knew how to dial it. Promise them “Never Again,” promise them NATO, promise them a chance to cut off the head of Stalin’s ghost — just enough flame to send them into a grinder they can’t win. The carbon was real. The switchboard made sure the match was always handy.
This is not an apologia for Putin’s slaughter. It’s not a soft word for the men at the Kremlin. It’s the opposite: it’s an accusation aimed at anyone who looks at someone else’s ancestral pain and says, “That’ll burn nicely.”
You want to see how soft power works? Look at Hawaii. I grew up there. Everybody knew the kingdom was stolen. The crown lands, the sugar barons, the Navy bases squatting on beaches that once belonged to your great-grandparents — everybody knew. But most of the time it was a ghost that slept. A quiet rage that drifted through uncle and auntie stories, backyard beers, kids jumping off the pier and dreaming of moving to Vegas. The Sovereignty Movement was real but mostly starved for oxygen. It was buried carbon.
Now? It’s a hashtag, a pop-up protest on Instagram, a TED Talk. Duolingo wants you to “learn Hawaiian” while hedge funds buy Maui piece by piece. The grief is real. But once the switchboard plugs in, that grief can be dialed into virtue points, tourist guilt, the soft glow of empire laundering its sins by turning your old humiliations into bumper stickers. The carbon burns — but the people still can’t afford to stay on their own island. That’s the hinge.
The same ghost hums in every kitchen where my mother poured gin at dawn. I quit drinking in 2020, but the pipe still hums for me too. It comes out sideways now: overeating, overthinking, writing too many words at 3 AM for an audience that probably doesn’t even exist. This is what people miss: the ghost is not just the tragedy that happened. It’s the open line. If you’re not careful, you end up feeding it every day, letting it circle your ribs like an old dog. And if you don’t guard it, someone will gladly do it for you — dial it up, reroute it, pump it into the machine to sell you a new freedom.
I could pull in the Shoah here and I will, because it’s the hardest truth to say right. The Holocaust is not a bedtime story — it’s the nightmare that eats all the bedtime stories. It lives in every synagogue, every Friday night when candles are lit, every bunker door in Tel Aviv, every checkpoint and Iron Dome briefing. That fear is real. It says: Never Again. But “Never Again” is not just a guard dog — it can become a hired gun. The same carbon that keeps you vigilant keeps you justifying all kinds of walls, checkpoints, bulldozers, and bombs. It’s not the same as the people who died in the camps — it’s the echo that says you’ll never be cattle again. And the machine knows how to stoke it: politicians, arms dealers, settlers, and ideologues — all ready to dial the ghost at the perfect moment.
None of this makes the trauma fake. It makes it vulnerable. And the only honest thing you can say about it is that no one is safe from the switchboard. You think the white working class in America doesn’t have a floorboard humming with the ghosts of the Great Depression, or the factories that never came back after NAFTA, or the humiliation of 2008 when the banks were saved and they weren’t? The algorithm knows. So do the people who whisper about “replacement” and “betrayal” and “where did your job go?” It’s the same seam, stoked from embers to open flame.
We keep telling ourselves these ghosts can be exorcised. But I think they just wait for someone to lift the receiver. My pop-pop thought he could bottle it by moving my nana to the end of the road. But the phone line was always there. Now it’s a smartphone. Now it’s a TikTok feed. Now it’s a well-funded NGO that wants to help you “speak your truth” as long as that truth comes with hashtags, donations, and votes.
I’m not better than this. I’m not outside it. I’m just the orphan who knows the hum because the ice cubes clinked every night and no one wanted to say the word. I’m the switchboard too. So are you.
This isn’t a sermon. It’s an elegy for the carbon we can’t seem to keep buried. It’s a confession that the ghost never dies — but you don’t have to feed it to the same machine every generation. Some ghosts want a memorial. Some want a closed door. Some want to stay asleep. It’s on us to know which is which.
If you read this far, you’re one of the few who can’t pretend you didn’t hear the line ring. May you watch your floorboards. May you guard your switchboard. May you remember that every coal seam you feed burns someone’s lungs in the end.
That’s the hinge.
APPENDIX: THE SWITCHBOARD, FACTS, GLOSSARY & COUNTER-ARGUMENTS
On Epigenetics
This is not pop psych. It’s what happens when stress hormones, famine, or systemic terror alter gene expression — so a grandchild might metabolize fear in the gut or the blood in ways that make them easy to hook. See: Dutch Hunger Winter, children of the Shoah, Black American descendants of slavery. These changes don’t mean you’re doomed — but they do mean the floorboards hum.
On the Holodomor
A state-made famine, 1932–33, when Stalin broke Ukraine’s back by starving millions. Ancestral trauma that still shapes Ukrainian resistance and fear. Western intelligence did not invent the wound — but they knew where it lived.
On the Shoah
The Holocaust, the Final Solution — a genocide so total that its echo is forever present for Jewish people. “Never Again” is real. This piece does not mock that. It names how fear can be stoked — both to protect and to justify. That is the moral tension.
On Hawaii
Sovereignty is real. Crown lands were stolen. A kingdom was overthrown. The people who carried that grief mostly did it in daily life — until the carbon was stoked back into hashtags and TED Talks. The ghost burns bright but the rent stays high. That’s the hinge.
On Manufactured Dissent vs. Manufactured Consent
Chomsky taught us how propaganda manufactures consent. This is the flip: the ghost is real, the rage is real — but the switchboard reroutes it. The more you think you’re free, the more you’re still plugged in.
On the Orphan’s Perspective
No finger wagging here. The ice cubes clinked in my childhood too. Pop-pop moved my nana. She called anyway. My people drank their ghosts. I quit but the ghost just waits for another pipeline. I’m not outside it — I’m describing the floorboards under my feet.
Counter-Arguments:
This piece does not blame the victim. It says trauma makes you easy to bait.
It does not dismiss real grief. It says you need to see when your grief is repackaged and sold back to you.
It is not pro-Putin. It is not anti-Ukraine. It’s the hinge: see how old wounds get used by those who benefit.
It is not anti-Jewish. It is not “both-sidesing” the Shoah. It says: “Never Again” is true and powerful — but also tempting to those who profit from permanent siege mentality.
Glossary — Clean, No Snark
• Epigenetics: Heritable changes in gene expression shaped by environment or stress.
• Holodomor: Ukraine’s forced famine under Stalin.
• Shoah: The Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
• Bloodlands: The Eastern European killing fields of WWII.
• Carbon Sequestration (Metaphor): Burying ancestral grief until it’s re-extracted for fuel.
• Switchboard: The line that lets the ghost dial out.
• Stoked: Not surf slang — stoked as in feeding embers fresh air.
📚 GLOSSARY — Manufactured Dissent
Epigenetics
The field of biology that studies how life experiences, especially extreme stressors like famine, genocide, or repeated violence, can alter the way genes are expressed — not the genes themselves, but whether they’re “switched on or off.” These changes can echo down through generations, leaving descendants more prone to chronic stress, anxiety, or physical conditions linked to ancestral trauma. The idea is not determinism but vulnerability: the ghosts in the DNA can make you more flammable when the world offers you a match. Examples include studies of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, descendants of the Dutch Hunger Winter, or Native communities with collective memories of boarding schools and forced removals.
Holodomor
Ukrainian for “death by hunger.” Refers specifically to the catastrophic, state-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine (1932–1933) under Joseph Stalin’s rule. Millions died as grain was requisitioned and exported while peasants starved. For Ukrainians, the Holodomor is more than a historical fact — it’s an enduring national trauma that shapes their relationship to Russia. It remains a live nerve in the Ukrainian psyche: the fear that Moscow’s shadow always means hunger, erasure, and betrayal. In this piece, it’s an example of a buried coal seam that foreign powers know how to stoke when they need local resolve to fight.
Bloodlands
A term coined by historian Timothy Snyder to describe the region of Eastern Europe where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union overlapped in their campaigns of mass murder from the 1930s through World War II. This includes modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltics. It’s shorthand for a region defined by layers of trauma: forced famines, purges, ghettos, and camps. In this essay, the “Bloodlands” remind us that trauma in these places is not an artifact — it’s an unquiet grave that global politics can always disturb when convenient.
Shoah
The Hebrew word for “catastrophe” — used to name the Holocaust: the industrial-scale genocide that exterminated six million Jews under the Nazi regime. “Never Again” is not an empty slogan but a moral architecture built out of that horror. The piece uses this term not to diminish Jewish trauma but to show how deep scars create both vigilance and a vulnerability to be manipulated by politicians and power brokers. The Shoah is the ghost that never quite sleeps — it hums in policy, in borders, in the moral permissions a state gives itself to defend its people from becoming cattle again.
Intergenerational Trauma
The idea that psychological and physiological scars from massive injustice or abuse are not just “talked about” but lived through descendants. Passed down through silence, family rituals, nervous systems primed for fear, and behaviors meant to prevent old humiliations from recurring. Examples: a Black American family tracing health disparities to the legacy of slavery; Native communities whose addiction and suicide crises link back to forced relocation or boarding schools; families fractured by the Shoah or the Holodomor who still avoid certain conversations. Not a theory to make people helpless — but a warning that these ghosts are part of the floorboards.
Manufactured Consent
Originally coined by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their landmark work Manufacturing Consent. It describes how governments and corporations use media, propaganda, and distraction to get people to agree to policies that actually hurt them. It’s about passivity — a population lulled into nodding along.
Manufactured Dissent
The hinge of this essay. The flip side of manufactured consent: instead of pacifying people, you deliberately provoke old grievances and unsolved traumas, then direct the rage toward convenient targets. The suffering is real — the baiting is intentional. The result is that people burn the same coal twice: first when the harm happened, again when someone else lights the fuse for profit, power, or ideological ends.
Switchboard
Your central metaphor: the old trauma is always humming under the floorboards, but the modern world gives it a line out. A literal phone for your nana, the internet for an entire nation, an NGO or an algorithm that promises to “elevate your story” while pumping your rage back into the machine. The switchboard is what connects individual pain to a much larger current — and once it’s dialed, it’s hard to hang up.
Stoked
Not surf slang here — an image from coal and fire. To stoke is to feed embers fresh air or fuel, to revive something that was dormant. In this piece, “stoked” means the old coal seam — ancestral hurt, generational shame — is exposed again, not invented, but reanimated by new actors with their own ends.
Cul-de-Sac Story
Your family parable: moving your nana to the end of a rural road, thinking you can contain the ghost by changing geography. It didn’t work because she still had the telephone — the switchboard. That single domestic truth becomes the stand-in for how we treat entire cultures: you can bury the pain, but unless you bury the line out, the ghost will always dial.
Soft Power
The subtle, indirect means by which a nation or institution projects influence without brute force: cultural exports, educational programs, NGO work, foreign aid, language revival apps, curated history lessons. Soft power is the friendly face that can still reroute the ghost. It doesn’t bomb you — it uses your pain to get your allegiance. A powerful tool for states that want moral authority while still playing the long game of control.
Underground Railroad (Modern Metaphor)
The real Underground Railroad was a network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the 19th century — one of the few moral stories Americans cling to when we look back at slavery. Today, it’s often used as a rhetorical cloak for any modern cause that wants to borrow that aura of unambiguous heroism: “We’re the good ones who would have hid Anne Frank,” “We’re the new Harriet Tubmans.” The danger is that it can become a moral costume that flattens real, messy, unsolvable grief into a feel-good bedtime story.
Carbon Sequestration (Metaphor)
Borrowed from climate science. Just as ancient carbon in the ground (coal, oil) stayed buried for millennia until humans extracted and burned it, ancestral trauma can stay buried until a new generation — or a new manipulator — digs it up and sets it aflame again. Once burned, it poisons the atmosphere all over again.
Bedtime Story (Reframed)
In this essay, the “bedtime story” is the sugar-coated version of history: Disney-fied, sanitized, safe enough to sleep to. But the real old stories — the Brothers Grimm, the Slavic folk horror, the Viking saga — were dark because they were meant to keep you awake. They warned you: the forest is real, the wolf is real, and the only real protection is knowing what lurks in the shadows.
✅ Why This Glossary Matters
This glossary isn’t filler — it’s armor. It makes clear that you’re not tossing around pop trauma buzzwords or conspiratorial short cuts. You’re tracing the moral hinge: the ghost is real. The switchboard is real. The bait is real. The question is whether you’ll see it for what it is before you dial your pain right back into the same machine that profits from it.
Closing Blessing
May you know your ghosts. May you witness them but not sell them cheap. May you watch the floorboards hum but keep your switchboard guarded. May you drink the whole bottle of your own story — not the boxed wine your enemies would sell you in its place.
May you remember: not every coal seam is meant to burn forever.
Manufactured Dissent: The Switchboard of Ancestral Trauma
The provided text explores the concept of "manufactured dissent," arguing that societal and political manipulation often exploits deep-seated, intergenerational traumas rather than inventing new ones. Using metaphors like "ghosts" and "coal seams," the author illustrates how historical pain—such as famines, genocides, or land dispossession—lies dormant until intentionally reignited by external forces for various gains. The "switchboard" symbolizes the mechanisms, from social media to political rhetoric, that connect individual or collective ancestral suffering to broader agendas, turning genuine grief into a tool for "profit, power, or ideological ends." The text emphasizes that while these traumas are profoundly real, their redirection can lead individuals and communities to unknowingly fuel systems that perpetuate their own pain, urging awareness to avoid this cycle.
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