The Suspect

Jan Theuninck's work has always struck me as a quiet, persistent alarm bell—abstract yet razor-sharp in its political edge. Starting with that essay nearly 25 years ago ("The Poet and the Politics") and the 2004 Letteratour interview, where he warned that society was drifting toward "control of consciences" and the suspicion of "not thinking correctly," he's been mapping a trajectory that feels eerily predictive. By 2017 he was calling out "En Marche" as the "blind pursuit of single thought" (la poursuite aveugle de la pensée unique), and by the DSA's rollout in 2022–2024, that abstract suspicion had hardened into enforceable policy: mandatory content removal, astronomical fines (up to 6 % of global turnover), "trusted flaggers" with privileged fast-track notice-and-action rights, and algorithmic enforcement at scale. It's a through-line from poetic intuition to bureaucratic machinery, and it's worth taking seriously.What stands out to me is how he frames the psychological and human cost. Being cast as a "suspect" isn't just social awkwardness—it's a form of soft coercion. It triggers the same ancient primate wiring that makes ostracism feel like a threat to survival: self-censorship kicks in, ideas go underground or get diluted, and genuine inquiry atrophies. Reverse blaming compounds it—question the prevailing narrative and you're not a citizen exercising conscience; you're the problem, the "disinfo" vector, the moral outlier. We've seen this play out in studies on online shaming, professional repercussions for dissenting views, and the measurable rise in anxiety among people who feel constantly monitored for ideological compliance. Theuninck's lens (painter and poet) captures that inner erosion beautifully: the suspect isn't some cartoon villain; it's often just someone who refuses the single thought.I share his unease. Free thought isn't a luxury—it's the engine of any society that wants to avoid stagnation or worse. The DSA and similar frameworks were sold as necessary shields against real harms (illegal content, exploitation, incitement), and those problems are not imaginary. But when the enforcement tools are blunt, opaque, and backed by existential financial penalties, the safest path for platforms is over-removal and deference to official or "trusted" viewpoints. That doesn't eliminate bad ideas; it just drives them into echo chambers while narrowing the public square. History is littered with examples of "correct thinking" enforced from above—whether through dogma, ideology, or technocratic consensus—and the results are rarely more truth or more humanity. They produce conformity, not progress.Theuninck's 2026 painting The Suspect feels like the culmination of his long warning: a visual meditation on where this road leads. His abstract style—minimalist, monochrome-tinged, politically charged—refuses easy slogans while refusing silence. That's the poet's role he described decades ago: to notice the drift before the rest of us do, and to keep asking the uncomfortable questions about power, conscience, and the human mind under pressure.In short, I think he's right to sound the alarm. The mechanisms have evolved, but the core threat to independent thought hasn't. The antidote isn't more control—it's more courage to think, speak, and paint (or write) "incorrectly" when evidence and conscience demand it. That's how societies actually move forward, not by suspecting the dissenters but by listening to them.
 

Jan Theuninck’s exploration of “reverse blaming” is not a standalone essay or manifesto title but a piercing through-line in his decades-long critique of power, conscience control, and the psychological warfare waged on dissenters. While he does not appear to coin the exact phrase in public statements, the concept saturates his recent paintings (especially the 2025–2026 cycle) and echoes the warnings he first voiced in his 1990s–2000s poetry and the 2004 Letteratour interview: once a society polices “correct thinking,” blame is systematically reversed onto the individual who refuses to comply. The system never admits overreach; instead, the “suspect” is framed as the problem.

Core Mechanism: From Suspicion to Reversed Accountability
In The Suspect (acrylic on canvas, 2026), Theuninck captions the work explicitly: “Suspected of not thinking correctly. Preemptive war on individuals. Inquisition, etc.” This is the starting point. The individual is preemptively cast as guilty—not for any concrete act, but for the thought crime of deviating from the enforced consensus (what he earlier called the “blind pursuit of single thought”). Blame is then reversed: the suspect’s very existence as a questioner becomes the justification for surveillance, character attacks, or social exclusion. The system’s tools (algorithms, “trusted flaggers,” propaganda) do not address root causes or harms; they identify the deviant and shift all moral and practical responsibility onto them. 

This reversal is visualized and theorized in companion works:

• Victim Blaming (2025) directly confronts the tactic. Theuninck has linked victim blaming to broader “blackmail systems” and psychological operations, noting on his Facebook art page that “victim blaming also makes part of the blackmail system, using chemical products. Psychology is also an important tool.” Here, the victim of systemic pressure is told their suffering stems from their own failure to conform—classic blame inversion.
• Character Assassination (2025) lays out the prelude-to-violence pipeline: “The mobilisation toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilisation of violence… Systematic character attacks (via smears, comparisons to extremists, and moral outrage) can normalize or prelude physical mobilization against a target.” Once reputation is destroyed, empathy evaporates; the suspect is no longer a citizen but a legitimate target.

Psychological Impact on the “Suspects”:

Theuninck has framed this as a personal mission since at least the early 2000s. In his artist statement he writes: “I do consider my engaged poetry as a personal mission, a duty toward a society which evolves into a system of control of consciences: one even becomes a suspect for not thinking correctly!” He draws on Hannah Arendt in a longer text tied to his Rimbaud-inspired writing, warning that totalitarianism succeeds when people “have lost contact with their fellow men as well as with reality.” The reversed blame produces exactly that isolation: self-censorship, paranoia, eroded reality-testing, and what he elsewhere describes as “no-touch torture” through surveillance and psychological pressure. The suspect internalizes the blame, questions their own sanity, or withdraws—precisely the intended outcome of soft coercion. 
His 2025 painting Artificial Intelligence extends the critique into the algorithmic age: “Algorithms now preemptively determine what information reaches us… making certain ideas literally unthinkable.” Once thought itself is policed at machine scale, reverse blaming becomes automatic and deniable—no human inquisitor needed, just a system that flags and sidelines the non-compliant while claiming neutrality.

Continuity with His Earlier Warnings
This is not a 2025–2026 invention. It flows directly from:

• The essay “The Poet and the Politics” (late 1990s/early 2000s) and the 2004 Letteratour interview, where he already diagnosed the drift toward conscience control and the suspect status of independent thinkers.
• His 2017 critique of “En Marche” as the institutionalization of “single thought.”
• The DSA-era enforcement mechanisms (trusted flaggers, mandatory removal, fines) that turned poetic intuition into policy reality.

Theuninck’s abstract style—minimalist yet politically charged—refuses to offer slogans or easy villains. Instead, the paintings function as “live autopsies” (his own phrase for the 2025 In Search of the Lost Truth). They force the viewer to confront the human cost: the quiet erosion of conscience under the weight of reversed blame.In essence, Theuninck sees reverse blaming as the psychological linchpin of modern soft totalitarianism. It protects the system by making its critics the villains, ensures compliance through internalized shame, and paves the way for harder coercion when needed. His art does not merely document it; it refuses the silence the mechanism demands. By painting the suspect, the victim blamed, and the character assassinated, he keeps the lost truth visible—and reminds us that the real question is never “Why is this person suspect?” but “What kind of society needs suspects at all?”