The persecution of Russian citizens by the prosecutor’s office for their opinions expressed on the web has so far been related to blog entries, comments, or in the extreme case microblogs. In other words, it was required at least one thing for the citizen to express his opinion verbally, and not a gesture. No one else seems to have been tried just for the fact that he once clicked the mouse on the “Like” button, expressing his approval or interest
in something that causes extreme disapproval of the authorities.
In the summer of 2012, however, even this simple gesture was decided in some cases to be declared illegal.
In the day before yesterday's
report of the IA "Theme Kazan", it is not difficult to read that the Prosecutor’s Office of Tatarstan presented Vitold Filippov, deputy head of the republican branch of the Russian All-Union Union (ROS) party, with the fact that he pressed
the Like button on a frame from the state movie " American
History X ”- which means that it
spread Nazi symbols. (One of the characters in the film is tattooed with a swastika.)
')
This act of the prosecutor’s office looks pretty wild, since the movie was not banned either in Russia or abroad; Moreover, in Russia “American History X” was repeatedly shown on federal TV channels, and in the States the film was nominated
for “Oscar”. (For those who did not look, it is appropriate to tell at the same time that the main idea, the main idea of ​​this film is rather anti-racist, although it shows - clearly and naturalistically - a whole series of crimes of interracial nature committed by black against white and white against black.)
But it is even more unpleasant to realize that bringing to administrative responsibility for a “like” comes close to the Orwellian notion of “thought-breaking”: now the thoughts that are unpleasant to the state cannot be expressed on the Internet not only with a word, but also with a gesture.
What next? - perhaps, prosecution for illegal mimicry, observed on the faces of citizens through the eyes of television cameras webcams?