Police in Moscow arrested Yekaterinburg resident Dmitry Bakhtin on Monday after he staged a one-man protest on Red Square in an effort to convince the Russian authorities to provide lifesaving medication to his three-year-old son, according to the news outlet Sota. A journalist from Sota who was covering the protest was arrested as well.
Bakhtin has been arrested multiple times in the past for protesting, including on Red Square. Bakhtin’s son, Misha, suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), and the medication he requires, risdiplam, is one of the most expensive medications in the world. Bakhtin has previously said that a year’s worth of the medicine costs 14 million rubles (about $140,000).
Always crazy to see and hear those stories and Pictures from the east. You could stand anywhere in Germany with a sign saying whatever you want, criticizing a war, the goverment or some foreign country and there would be no police or secret service that carried you away and put you in a car. You could stand in front of the Reichstag building calling Olaf Scholz a liar and make him accountable for some dubious conspiracy theory or suffering and death and no riot police would show up to drag you away. You would better bring food and water as it would be a long day and you probably would go home this evening because you were tired.
Imagine living in a mob state, where if you hold up a piece of paper without anything written on it is enough for riot police carry you to busses to bring you away. What a fucked up system Russia & China is trying to export into the world. A world, where people are not allowed to have a voice and the only truth is what Olaf Scholz wants to be. I am glad for the freedom I have compared to those systems. People must be brainwashed thinking this is what their forefather wanted for them and died for.
And then you have certain instances on here that will swarm threads with the asinine claim that places like Russia and China are the really free ones and it’s really Western countries that are totalitarian.
Like, no shit, every country has done/still does awful stuff sometimes, but I’m gonna go with the ones literally arresting people for expressing an opinion are the less free ones.
As long as you don’t stand on any roads. That is only allowed if you are a farmer with a tractor, not if you are just a person protesting climate change inaction. If you do it with some friends you would be called a member of a criminal organisation, be put on trial for coercion or even arrested preventively. And the vast majority of the political spectrum would think that is fine because they like cars.
They would not pick you up because of the sign and what it says but for the „Eingriff in den Strassenverkehr“ (Interference with road traffic). You can also not stand on railroads or the runway at an airport. All these are interferences with traffic. But I am your brother in thought that we have too many carbrains that overreact when protesters protest in the road. It is the reason why they do it on the road, to get the message out and build awareness for the topic they are protesting for.
But they don’t react in the same way when e.g. farmers protest by blocking the road with their tractors.
If you expect people to be rational thinking individuals, I have bad news for you
I just mean that it is not about the laws which rightfully punish interference with traffic in dangerous ways. That is, at best, another excuse. It also doesn’t really apply here since none of the news about the protestors mention any sort of dangerous traffic situation (apart from people deliberately trying to run them over). No last minute braking, no swerving,…
These things always puts it into perspective. On one hand you have Germany under Hitler, China, Russia where protesting gets you vanished, on the other hand you have Poland, Hungary, USA where you can do what you want. Weights twice as heavy on the people in the more free nations to not protest their government’s terrorism and/or facism.