bruh moment

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.”

~T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets  

On April 1, a Moscow court debated the case of four editors from the student magazine Doxa on trial for charges of inciting minors to take part in protests. The grounds for the criminal prosecution of Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Natalia Tyshkevich, and Vladimir Metelkin was the publication of a video in January 2021, in which they called on university administrators stop threatening students who were participating in rallies in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny. At the hearing on April 1, the prosecutor asked that the accused be sentenced to two years of correctional labor. The defendants in the case also delivered their final statements. The verdict is set to be handed down tomorrow, April 12. On the eve of the sentencing hearing, Meduza has published the final statement of Doxa editor-in-chief Armen Aramyan.

Honorable court!

There are not many places remaining in Russia today where I may speak freely about what is happening in our country. I would like to seize the opportunity to say a few words at this public hearing. One month ago, Russia launched its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. Thousands of civilians have died as a result of these hostilities; according to the preliminary data, 5,000 people have died in Mariupol alone. Before I make my final statement, I would like to observe a moment of silence in memory of those who have died in this war. I believe that every public event in Russia today should begin with a moment of silence.

[…] I know how Russian universities work, I know the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship that pervades them. Even in the most daring and free universities, young people are indoctrinated with this mindset: “You are still young, don’t stick your neck out, don’t risk your life, we will expel you, we will ruin your life.” I have seen firsthand the way these excessive and absurd threats affect young people. They rob us of freedom and of the feeling that we can change anything.

Right now, fear and self-censorship are the main pillars of this regime. Every time people begin to unite around common goals, every time they feel like it’s in their power to change something, the state immediately perceives this as a threat. Any opportunity for people to freely associate constitutes a threat to the regime because this regime cannot govern a society, it can only control a scattering of individuals. The authorities immediately respond to any attempts of unification with repressions. The main goal of their repressions is, of course, fear.

And the fear really does mean that we are always alone. There is no society, there are no common interests, you cannot accomplish anything together with other people. Fear makes you painstakingly assess the personal risks: I could be thrown in jail, I could be beaten up, I could be fired or expelled, they could do something to my family. It’s as though the state is saying: “It’s all just your personal problems, your personal risks, your personal achievements. If you just put your head down and focus on your personal problems, we might not bother interfering with your little life. But if you decide that you are capable of something greater if you join forces with other people, we will destroy you instantly.” When Putin’s regime smashes the last vestiges of independent media, declares our largest political organizations to be extremists, it’s an attack against any free association of people.

The terror our state engages in only pretends to be rational. The state, and we too, often justify its repressions. We say, well, yes, we shouldn’t have been so radical, we didn’t need to speak out so harshly, there’s not point in fighting for people who have already been arrested, they knew what they were getting into. But this rationality is an illusion. The objective of state terror is to intimidate all of us so that we feel threatened all the time, so that we become our own censors, constantly weighing our own actions.

[…] Solidarity — this was precisely the point of our video. In it, we certainly did not call for any rallies. We simply wanted for other college students and schoolchildren to feel that they are not alone, that they have support. So that these threats from school and university administrations would not sow the destructive seed of self-censorship in them.

When I first got suggested I might have ADHD, I wasn't 100% sure that I would, I was the inattentive type as a child and maybe everyone struggles with the exact same thing that I and the certified diagnosed ADHD people do, but I figured that fuck it, I'm just going to bullshit them into giving me a diagnosis anyway in case the meds do help me after all, and then discovered that I didn't need to lie about anything they asked me.

I didn't believe there would be careers in art, not to mention a way to make a whole goddamn living by drawing comics. Comic art is only for the Certified Super Talented Legends Who Are Better Than Me. But I kept drawing anyway and people liked the dumb crap I was drawing, and apparently the art world has no other quality control than having people enjoy your dumb crap.