Via Borepatch comes news of some super geniuses in Greenpeace who can’t understand why they’re sitting in a Russian jail. They illegally boarded a state-owned oilrig as part of a protest and were promptly arrested for piracy.
“They had never expected that they would face such consequences for their peaceful protest in a democratic state.”
There are two tiny little problems with that statement:
- Illegally trespassing on someone else’s property is not exactly “peaceful.”
- Russia is not a democratic state, it’s dictatorial state with a thin veneer of democratic trappings. Did they not notice all the people that Putin has had bumped off over the years?
Now they’re sitting in jail awaiting trail, wonder why they haven’t received the slap on the wrist they regularly get from other countries.
Real activists should expect to do time in jail. Vaclav Havel spent plenty of time in jail, as did Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And they were pushing for real social change, not pie-in-the-sky trust fund environmentalism.
Actions have consequences. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time…
