Originally published at: Watch: Russian cops arrest woman for holding a blank sign | Boing Boing
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Blank signs are incredibly subversive, in that authorities will read their most hated messages there.
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Look how many police officers are there just waiting around.
It’s like a school of sharks circling, waiting for a seal to slip into the water.
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Everyone knew the purpose of the sign. Trying to lawyer your way around an authoritarian is a fool’s brand.
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People will tell you not to be afraid of this woman and her blank sign, but what’s this really about? What does her sign really say? What might she have meant to write down if she hadn’t forgotten her pen? Would it says bow ties look stupid? Would it have said that having a wealthy soup heiress step mother might turn someone into an over-privileged twit? Would it have said that white men like me should be rounded up and put in cages? There’s just no way to know, is there?
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I can’t help but contrast those arrests with the ones I saw here in Kenosha and televised from other US locations. When Russian arrests in an open dictatorship look sedate compared to those in your own country, it may be time to examine your system more closely. (Not that I didn’t know that already, of course.)
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I saw a video of cops stopping apparently random people in some public square to search their phones, presumably for any unapproved opinions they might have…
Also an independent survey company asked Russians’ views on the war, and a got a lot of responses like:
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Guess which blank finger I’m holding up, Right Now!
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I think it’s a mistake to suggest that the protesters are “trying to lawyer [their] way around”. Seriously? You actually think that’s what they’re doing?
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I saw a picture of a guy from a couple of days ago holding a sign with two words, but every letter replaced with *. He too was arrested.
EDIT: found it. Apparently without *s it’s “fuck war”.
That third one seems to have been the first, already three weeks ago.
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Re: the video in that last tweet. If the subtitles were correct in a version I saw yesterday, the second woman who was arrested was actually criticizing the videographer for not recording supporters of the war, of which she was one.
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Obviously they should just go back to their homes and stay silent.
Perhaps she’s a nihilist. Say what you will about fascist kleptocrats…
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They recognized themselves in it.
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Theres another video floating around where a journalist is filming riot police in the Red Square then a women approaches and starts giving a pro-Putin statement and the police still pick her up and take her away.
It’s not that they want to prevent people from spreading the wrong message. They want to prevent people from spreading any message.
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This was done in HK 2 years ago. Shows you how comunist managed countries are great for “freedom of blank speech”
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Russia is not a communist country and has not been for a while now.
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Aha but those people were in organized protest, not single protest, which is still legal in Russia.
Unless of course your protest is too similar to a bunch of other protests that have happened in the last few days. That in itself is enough to get you arrested for organized protest. (According to recent first-person account on Quora. So curious that one can still post stuff like that on the web… as long as it’s not in Russian…)
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Psychic Paper from Dr. Who?
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