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Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, says that passengers on the Titanic actually didn’t want to leave the ship for almost two hours after it hit the iceberg. Pavel Durov says we are in a similar situation: our ship has already hit the iceberg. We have already started to sink without even realizing it. He is talking about the ship of our personal freedoms. He says that personal freedoms have been eroded almost everywhere in the world, with very few exceptions. He has witnessed firsthand the methods governments use to suppress our freedoms and take away our basic rights. He has seen all the tricks: the PR tricks, the legal tricks, the political tricks, the manipulations, and the official excuses. The thing that bothers him most today is that some of the same tricks employed by authoritarian regimes in places like Russia, China, and Iran are now also being used in some Western countries. ————— Here are some key statements from Pavel Durov: “Thousands of people are getting arrested every year in the United Kingdom for social media posts.” “You say something politically incorrect online, you may end up being fined or spend some time in prison. In Germany, people get arrested and persecuted for insulting politicians online, thousands of people every year.” “You call a politician a bigot or a thief online and you can serve up to 3 years in prison. So, now people are afraid to use their real identities. People stop using their real names when they make comments online.” “The criminals will be fine. It will be the law-abiding citizens who will be put in danger.” “Last year, a French tax official was caught stealing the financial data of people who held large amount of crypto assets… you have a catastrophic rise in the number of kidnappings in France. Just in the first 3 months of 2026, you have over 40 victims of kidnappings in France.” “Another trick that has been used by authoritarians for decades. And now it is being increasingly exported from the East to the West. I’m talking about selective enforcement of laws. The way it works is pretty straightforward. First, you need to introduce a large number of laws. You need to overburden a certain industry with excessive, mutually exclusive, contradictory regulation. As a result, you make compliance impossible. Now you can treat every entrepreneur, every CEO, every business owner in this country as a criminal. But then the government carefully starts to choose who to persecute. If the business owner is loyal, if it complies with immoral, unlawful demands from the government, gives certain political favors, then the law enforcement system and the judicial system look the other way. But if the business owner decides to stand up for the constitutional rights of his or her fellow citizens, if they refuse to cave in to political demands from the authoritarian government, then the persecution comes in full.” “We cannot afford to have this ship sunk. There is nowhere to escape. In the past, dissidents from authoritarian countries could flee to the West. But if the current trajectory continues, in a decade or two from now, they will have hard time trying to understand whether they have already left their repressive homeland or they’re just entering another open-air prison.” “Those who are willing to give up their essential liberty for some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ————— Which would you choose: essential liberty or temporary safety?