A satirical sculptor from Düsseldorf has expressed bewilderment after Russian prosecutors charged him in a Moscow court with criminally defaming the country’s army.
Jacques Tilly, 62, is Germany’s most prominent designer of carnival floats and has spent 40 years creating outsized and grotesque papier-mâché models of figures including President Trump, Angela Merkel and Baroness May of Maidenhead.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his floats have repeatedly mocked President Putin’s brutality.
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This year’s float for the Düsseldorf carnival depicted Trump and Putin shaking hands, with President Zelensky crushed in their grip and haemorrhaging blood, along with the caption: “Hitler-Stalin pact 2.0”.
Previous editions have shown Putin choking on a map of Ukraine and posing naked alongside Trump and President Xi of China, with a gigantically enlarged scrotum emblazoned with the words “Make Russia great again”.
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The key difference between those two cases is that the Russian government is going after the sculptur, whereas the German case is the individual soldier sueing the student for insulting him personally by basically calling the officer a Nazi.
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The soldier was clearly visible in the photo and wearing a name tag, which was also clearly readable. That was why the court went with personal defamation.
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If Bentik actually did not want to slander the individual soldier, he would have apologized. So I believe he did want to slander him, because the soldier is a soldier.
Also obviously the recruitment drive was challenged.
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well, calling a random soldier an SS member isn’t criticism is is defamation
nice try orc
To broadly call someone you don’t know an ‘orc’ isn’t the way arguments should be had - even if that someone themselves is broadly calling people they don’t know ‘murderers’.
Even if you know someone and even if that person did horrible things dehumanizing them like that is still wrong.
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