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Anime Nazi Image Lands Russian Activist in Police Questioning

A campaigner for the Russian liberal democratic political party, The People's Freedom Party (PARNAS), was summoned for questioning by Russian police after he shared a video on social media that included an anime character wearing a swastika armband. Public display of Nazi symbols is outlawed in Russia and Semyon Kochkin, who shared the video on his VKontacte page, could face 15 days in jail.

The video was created by Russian rappers Vitya SD and Zamay, who sampled a song by 17-year-old singer Monetochka. The music video includes a series of photo collages, one of which includes Monetochka's face, the Nazi anime character, a Chinese flag, Ian Curtis, a Russian flag, and other random images. Monetochka also shared the video but was not brought in for questioning.

Since Kochkin was brought in for questioning, Monetochka has called out the situation as merely a ruse to arrest Kochkin for his political activities.

"If the government shuts down the internet, or destroys its anonymity... if it takes away the opportunity for people to express opinions, they will still find a way to do these things because they need to. So I'm not happy about the current trend," Monetochka says.

The singer wrote a "prison chanson" style song about the situation and uploaded it. It's been viewed 48,831 times since April 10.

Russia's governmental censorship committee investigated the local television showings of the GTO anime series and have banned other series as child pornography. A defendant in Volgograd received a sentence of three years of jail time for the dissemination of Japanese animated child pornography in 2014.

Source: BBC News