Russian democracy activist Maria Gaidar has launched a social media campaign in solidarity with the hundreds of people who have been arrested in the wake of post-election protests called ARRESTme2. On her LiveJournal blog, she calls on readers to declare their solidarity with people like blogger Alexei Navalny by tweeting using the #ARRESTme2 hashtag and by joining and spreading a Facebook group with the same goal. She writes (with lousy translation provided by Google Translate):
The mass arrests that took place yesterday – this is a test for us all. Test on civic awareness, the ability to empathize and support each other. If we do not shall state their attitude towards what has happened, the next time the arrests may be a 2-month, year, 5 years.
Our task – to show that people who are not prepared to tolerate the illegal arrests of politically motivated decisions of the court, physically much much more than they think.
We demand freedom for Navalny, Yashin and other 1,000 people whose names I could not find it, but really wanted to know. All of us – citizens of Russia, and we are not afraid, we are ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, and say: “Do you want to arrest? Arrest me, too.”
There is also an affiliated crowdmap of the protests underway in Moscow.
December 08, 2011