Europeans don’t remember the events of 2020 in Belarus, wrote the authors of the Telegram channel ZhS Premium five days after the anniversary of the protests, which the Belarusian opposition marked with rallies in several cities.
“Propagandists carried out a survey in Germany: they went out on the streets, stopped people by a fragment of the Berlin Wall painted in the colors of the white-red-white pads, and asked, ‘What do you remember about the protests in Belarus five years ago?’ The answer was always the same: ‘We don’t know anything,’” the post said.
To back up their claim, they attached a video of the survey. The footage turned out to be genuine. The original was published August 13 on the YouTube channel Deutsche Welle Belarus. The outlet’s journalists asked passersby in Berlin not only about the 2020 protests but also what they knew about Belarus in general. The filming took place at Potsdamer Platz, where a fragment of the Berlin Wall gifted to the Belarusian diaspora has stood for five years.
Many respondents really did know little about our country and the events of five years ago. But not everyone. The original video runs more than five minutes and includes other answers that ZhS Premium did not show. For example, one woman said:
“There is a dictator in power there now, I heard something like that. I saw a report on television saying that in Belarus there is a woman fighting for freedom, and now she is in prison because of it.”
Another passerby replied: “We followed how the protests unfolded. … The last thing I heard was that the opposition in the country had been silenced. …
Those events showed that Belarusians do not want to live in an autocracy.”
