A Swedish plane violated the Belarus airspace in July penetrating the air space over Minks and dropping — how cute can color revolutions get? — teddybears. The cuddly toys carried messages of “human rights” encouraging the people of Belarus to revolt and demand their rights.
The action was ostensibly organized by Studio Total, a Swedish advertising agency animated by activism on behalf of, you guessed it, human rights.
Now Belarus’ top security agency has summoned the Swedes involved to appear for questioning, a demand met with incredulous outrage by the MSM, the US and the European Union, all stalwart defenders of human rights.
The AP description of the events below makes clear that only an authoritarian, nay a tyrant, like the president of Belarus can have an objection to the adorable teddybear action”

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Belarus’ top security agency — the KGB — has summoned a Swedish advertising team for questioning after the group air-dropped hundreds of parachute-wearing teddy bears that carried pro-human rights messages onto the soil of the authoritarian ex-Soviet state. The agency threatens the Swedes with fines or even jail time if they don’t show up in 10 days.
The July 4 teddy bear drop by Studio Total infuriated Belarus’ autocratic President Alexander Lukashenko, who fired two generals over it. It also may have added stress to already deteriorating diplomatic relations between Stockholm and Minsk. Earlier this month, Belarus effectively expelled Sweden’s ambassador and ordered the Nordic state to close its embassy.
The summons, signed by an investigator named P. Tsernavsky and posted on the KGB’s website Saturday, says the agency is investigating the “criminal case” of the ad group’s “illegal crossing” into Belarusian airspace. The KGB said it wants the Swedes to participate in its “investigative actions” so it can clarify the role each person played and help it decide how to deal with two Belarusian men accused of aiding the Swedes.
One of the Belarusian suspects, a journalism student, was arrested after he posted photos of the teddy bears on his personal website; the other is a real estate agent who is said to have offered the Swedes an apartment when they visited Belarus some time before the stunt.
If the Swedes don’t show up within 10 days, the agency said they could face a fine or “correctional work for up to two years, or imprisonment for up to six months.”
Studio Total co-founder Tomas Mazetti, who piloted the plane in the teddy bear drop, said he received the summons via email, and that it demands he and two colleagues, Hannah Frey and Per Cromwell, appear.
It’s “a bit cute and tragic at the same time,” he said. “They just expect us to show up just because they say so.”
Mazetti told The Associated Press that the group wants legal advice before deciding what to do, and that the team members would likely demand guarantees that they would not be detained if they showed up. “We have nothing against helping them in their investigation to clarify just how we did it,” he said.
He added, however, that the legal proceedings against the two Belarusians were “really sad” and had “no logic.” He said political experts have warned that Lukashenko may be using the two Belarusians as pawns to force the Swedes to go to Minsk.
“It’s pure blackmail,” Mazetti said.
Studio Total has previously staged attention-grabbing campaigns by burning up stacks of cash and setting up a fake sex-school in Austria. Mazetti said it orchestrated the non-commercial air-drop of the 879 teddy bears to shine a light on Belarus’ poor record on human rights and freedom of speech and to embarrass its military, a pillar of Lukashenko’s power.
“That’s why we did it,” Mazetti said. “There are people jailed there just because they’ve said something.”
Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, a nation of 10 million, since 1994, repressing opposition groups and independent news media while preserving a quasi-Soviet economy with about 80 percent of industry in state hands. He has earned the nickname in the West of “Europe’s last dictator.”
Swedish-Belarusian relations have soured even more in the weeks since the teddy bear drop.
Earlier this month, Belarus said it would not allow the Nordic country’s ambassador to Minsk to return to his mission. The Swedes reciprocated by barring entry to the new Belarusian ambassador to Stockholm and asking two junior Belarusian diplomats to leave the country. Lukashenko’s regime then ordered the Swedish embassy in Minsk to close.
The United States and the European Union have expressed strong support for Sweden in the dispute.
Swedish authorities have said Belarus is angry over Stockholm’s promotion of human rights.
Although the teddy bear drop was not officially cited as a reason for the embassy closure or the barring of Sweden’s envoy, Lukashenko was cited Thursday as accusing Swedish diplomats of involvement in the stunt. According to the Interfax news agency, the Belarusian leader said the Swedes should count themselves lucky to have made it home alive.
“They should thank God that our calm people had pity for those pilots,” Interfax quoted Lukashenko as saying. “They should pray for our air defense forces, our border guards who spotted them right over the border and pitied them.”

I would rule out only beige.

agent Orange
the Yellow Peril
the Green zone in occupied Baghdad
the Black Death
the battle of the Reds and Whites in post-1917 Russia
Picasso’s Blue Period (here there are subtle semantic interplays at work – for example the suggestion of aristocratic menstrual blood laced with a hint of ribaldry is a fitting verbal monument to the Iberian Titan of the paintbrush).

not merely colour but also colourful language has its place in extending the range and increasing the precision of historical judgement, e.g.:

the Boston Tea-Party
the War of Jenkin’s Ear
and, of course, from the Bill Clinton presidency salty chicken soup diplomacy

(surely you don’t expect us to swallow that? ed.)

i think Ariadna is far too cynical about the nomenclature of our colour revolutions!!!

i should probably bear with my dissent in silence, but sometimes, on a matter of principle, one simply must speak out – regardless of consequences.

this new terminology is no chromatic aberration, no mere flash in the creative pan provoked by nasal inhalation of powdered alkaloids on a dull afternoon.

let’s admit it! history is dull in black and white!!!! deadly dull!!!!! and guess what!? kids aren’t interested in dull stuff! no wonder they play computer games instead of doing their homework. that is an entirely healthy response of youngsters eager for vivid experience.

no, if we want the attention of those to whom one day we will hand on the torch of freedom, then we must embrace the colour revolutions with wide-open arms.

more! we can do even better! we can build on our success!!!!

so we should now move up a notch, and give pleasant, fanciful names to all manner of world events, past, present and future. wouldn’t we have had more visitors to the UK this year if we’d called it “the Black-and-Tan Olympics” instead of naming this superb display after boring old London? won’t the (wo)man on the Clapham omnibus make a host of irrelevant associations with the word ‘London’- e.g. the banking capital of the world? – and won’t this detract from the superb athletic achievements of TeamGB???

research undertaken by Tesco’s marketing department suggest that a coloured pattern should be provided for every significant development in today’s busy world. and there’s more. each should have it’s musical appellation, a little jingle that people can hum as they joyfully head for work in the morning. imagine the splendid chorus on the 8.13 to Paddington as people read their newspapers!

also for each event-theme a characteristic odour should be chosen.(this would not have been possible without recent nobel-prize-winning discoveries in the chemical synthesis of macro-molecular olfactory stimuli)

i think i may safely stop there. deLiberation readers are more than intelligent enough to think of many creative applications of these ideas.

so spread the good news! totalitarian monopoly thanato-capitalism is not dead!!! it is merely sleeping. and we know just how to wake it up!

it needs a facelift. why not let’s treat history to a bit of pampering and TLC!!! and let’s admit (without bitterness, Ariadna) the colour revolutions have been a great start!!!

in the immortal words (suggestion: green and pink, with wavy white zig-zags, to the tune of “Ain’t Misbehaving”, and with a mixed scent from the sweat glands of the panelists on the popular BBC radio show Gardener’s Question Time) with which one of the greatest Fat Cats of the 20th century once exhorted his tireless stakhanovites:

let a thousand flowers bloom – Miao Tze-Dong

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