October 12: Spain's National Day and the release of Nando the Hispanic

A satirical piece denounces how a digital space that presents itself as a bastion of free will responds to a dissenting work with censorship. The sanction coincides with Spain's National Day (Día de la Hispanidad, October 12), a date the text uses to point out the contradiction between the rhetoric of sovereignty and the practice of silencing what is uncomfortable.

Some texts are born with the vocation to annoy. The one in question presents itself as a treatise, *El Niño Lunar: La imposición de nacer*, and its author describes it as a work that provoked the most predictable reaction in a forum: a negative review without verifying the purchase. The episode, told with irony, serves to portray a familiar internet dynamic: communities that proclaim themselves defenders of free will and react with hostility when someone contradicts them.

## The punitive review as a first filter

The mechanism is old. Someone publishes something, and before the text has even been read, it has already received a negative rating. The author calls it "the classic punitive review of an unverified purchase," a practice that on sales platforms and forums works as an entry filter: the work is not discussed, it is dismissed. It is not a phenomenon exclusive to any one country, but the text attributes it to what it calls "Spanish atavism in its purest state," an inertia that, according to its account, turns intellectual honesty into the exception.

A review without verification is not a crime, but it is a signal. It indicates that the judgment was formed not with the content in front of the reader, but with the identity of whoever signed it or with the discomfort its tone provokes. In economic terms, it is an entry cost for any creator who does not play by the group's unwritten rules.

## The attempted censorship and the chosen day

The text recounts that the reaction did not stop at the review. An administrator of the node, whom the author refers to by the nickname "Señor Procusto," allegedly decreed his digital expulsion. The expiration date of that sentence, according to the account, is **October 12**, Spain's National Day. The author underscores the coincidence: the amnesty for his expulsion arrives on the very day the military parade and the idea of national sovereignty are celebrated.

Irony is the backbone of the text. While the space presents itself as "the last bastion of free will" and "the agnostic lighthouse of the homeland's internet," in the face of a dissent the author calls an "axiomatic truth" it reacts with what he describes as "sheer panic at the untamed." Censorship, in this account, is not an accident, but the confirmation that the freedom being proclaimed has very precise limits: those set by the group's comfort.

## The cognitive dissonance of homeland freedom

The author takes the argument to the collective realm. He speaks of "cognitive dissonance of homeland freedom" and "bureaucratic chauvinism" to describe a contradiction that, in his view, is visible from outer space: freedom is brandished as a slogan while the dissident is proscribed. The text spares no insults toward those who administer that space, whom it accuses of "arrogance and ignorance" and of confusing freedom with submission to their own categories.

The date of **October 12** functions as a symbol. The author associates it with the "submissive military parade" and with a sovereignty he considers fake. It is not a new criticism: every anniversary of the National Day reopens the debate over what is celebrated and what is silenced. What this text adds is the use of that date as a mirror of a digital contradiction: that of those who celebrate freedom while curbing it in their own backyard.

The author signs off with a postscript acknowledging his own excess of pedantry. He does not apologize. He says it is what his "favorite wasteland" deserves. The provocation, in this case, is the message.