A post card from Traveling Matt I mean Spellus

[Razgovory]

Spellus wrote this and posted it on Facebook.  He says "hi" and he turned out mostly okay.

https://evnreport.com/raw-unfiltered/transgression-object-how-a-nice-mormon-boy-made-a-lot-of-azerbaijani-enemies/?fbclid=IwAR2d9N1jgedPJkK6n-eEhdkhECoMUUlp-3WdPPNaKnTerrbwRnBH8fBWmYQ

I am not an Armenian woman. 

That all this began on the understanding that a 193 cm tall blonde ex-Mormon was an Armenian woman came as a great surprise. Armenians, Azerbaijani dissidents are targeted for harassment, but the unstated assumption of everyone is that white Westerners are supposed to be okay.

When the harassment began impacting my family, the confusion deepened — why target my sisters? Toward the end of last year, this culminated in fear for my physical safety after a break-in to my apartment, terrifying my roommate and sending shockwaves through the tight-knit expat community of Tbilisi.

Why, or how, had I managed to make so many enemies in a part of the world so far from any place my family could call home? What was the purpose of this harassment? How did I get here?

The plight of the harassed, the experience of harassment, is an increasingly common one. As the nations of the Caucasus slide from flawed democracy, toward dysfunctional oligarchy and finally arrive at a near-totalitarian nationalist authoritarianism, transgressive harassment will come to shape every aspect of the discourse on the region.   

Frontline Gallery

My introduction to Azerbaijani politics was an emergency meeting of journalists and dissidents at the Tbilisi cultural venue Frontline on June 8th, 2017. Afgan Mukhtarli, an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights activist who had spent two years in Georgia, had just been abducted off the streets of Tbilisi, only to reappear in a jail cell in Azerbaijan. A number of major Azerbaijani figures left Georgia as quickly as possible for safer locales — Poland, Germany.  I was young, recently out of the eccentric teaching program Teach and Learn with Georgia, a program designed after Japan's JET that was meant to bring native English speakers to rural Georgia. I had followed Azerbaijani politics well enough to know the basics of the decline of civil rights organizations in the country since 2012, and that the government of Ilham Aliyev had become increasingly nationalistic and right-wing, but not enough to know names or recognize the faces of major figures. 

The atmosphere was tense, but I was amused that I was able to understand most of what everyone spoke in the room; people switched freely between Azerbaijani and Russian, and I had enough of my college Russian and Turkish (related to Azerbaijani) to be able to make sense of things.  A dissident who had already fled Georgia was conducting an interview, when a discordant note of panic ran through the audience. A man in the back of the room had moved his phone to the side to take a picture of the attendees, and when someone noticed this, the entire room erupted into a paroxysm of horror unlike anything I'd ever experienced. People, moments earlier silently listening to a respected dissident, were screaming, not for fear of themselves, but out of fear of what might happen to those still in Azerbaijan. I have no idea if the man who tried to take that picture was simply taking it for Instagram, but at the moment all I could think of was the Yezhovshchina, the Stalinist Great Terror, and the panic of those who fear not only for themselves, but for everyone in their lives.

With My Boyfriend, Along the Mahü

For most of the intervening years I was confined, as much by anxiety and depression, to the periphery of writing on the Caucasus. I made friends and enemies — Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Circassians, Chechens, historians, journalists — but arguments on social media were the outer limits of my influence on discourse about the region. Untethered by formal professional obligations, I spent much of my time enmeshed in various twitter disputes and talking with my friends and contacts. In the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, many of these arguments were with a series of Twitter accounts that used German names, occasionally tweeted in German, and claimed to be made by German and Austrian citizens. 

One account in particular claimed to be an Austrian woman in Vienna, but the performance was unconvincing. She knew decent High German, but failed to recognize Vienna slang, and when pressed would repeatedly insult my relatively public mental health issues (depression, anxiety) and neurodevelopmental disorder (NVLD, related to Autism and ADHD), as well as hint that she would see me "walking down Mahü (Vienna's central Mariahilfer Straße) with my boyfriend." Her account was deleted shortly after implying that people with my conditions — the aforementioned anxiety and depression — often committed suicide.

These trolls seemed to repeatedly insinuate that I was queer (I am straight), that I was Armenian (Mormon), or that my mental health would result either in my suicide or institutionalization, or that my NVLD meant that I was "retarded." It quickly became obvious to me that they were not overly convinced of the need to maintain the charade of being from Central Europe, or even attempt to convince people on Twitter of the righteousness of the Azerbaijani cause.  Focusing on my mental health made them look bad, so the harassment was the point. The attacks were their own reward; the act, the sheer joy of transgressing norms of accepted behavior was the real appeal, the hatred of Armenians and other 'enemies of Azerbaijan' serving merely as a permission structure.

Our Boy
Among these faux-German trolls, one stood out. He spoke better German, and knew working class dialectical insults common to areas such as Frankfurt's Offenbach, Neukölln in Berlin, Cologne's Chorweiler, Duisburg, or Vienna's own Favoriten, but what made him truly exceptional, even at this early stage, was his taste for threatening people sexually. He appears to have used the handle "Markus Kristophersen" at an early date, indicating some kind of relationship with the other faux-Germans, but he became fixated on the figure of Lola Avagyan, a pregnant Armenian woman who was raped, mutilated and murdered during the 1988 Sumgait Pogrom. Starting around March 2023, he began harassing me on Twitter, on the assumption that I was an Armenian woman.

I am not an Armenian woman. People tell me I look like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Jeffery Dahmer, and I hear it enough that I believe them. 

That did not seem to dissuade the stalker, however, who replied to most of my tweets for months with a bizarre and often surreal combination of rape threats, death threats, and insults in English, German, and an idiosyncratic Iranian-accented, occasionally ungrammatical Azerbaijani.  I was not his only target; under a variety of accounts, most of them named for Lola Avagyan, he would send dozens of tweets a day, always under a different account, targeting a number of prominent Armenian accounts (most of them women, who were slated for specifically sexualized threats) as well as Azerbaijani dissidents.  He would send 'gore,' violent images, often of the body of Lola Avagyan or the Armenian troops mutilated during the 2020 war or the 2022 skirmishes.  Around this time, Twitter trolls were beginning to realize that Elon Musk had destroyed Twitter's moderation and safety infrastructure, allowing these opportunistic trolls to flourish in the compromised immune system of what was soon to be X. I was annoyed, confused, and occasionally paranoid; he was sending me threats at all hours of the day, which seemed to indicate that he was either unemployed or this was his job, but he did not seem clever or psychologically stable enough to be in the official employ of any major organization that was capable of actually threatening me.  What changed my response, however, was when he began to target my sisters.

I am the brother of Eleanor and Sophie Thatcher, twin sisters who work as models and artists, with Sophie also working as an actress.  They live in the United States, and I live in the Caucasus, so I don't get to see them very often, but I will occasionally post about them, or reference them in my social media. After one such tweet, the stalker began to incessantly threaten them, first by direct messages to me, and later attempted to send messages to them directly. Past a certain point the harassment reached a level where I was embarrassed to even talk about it; the threats were too graphic and constant to describe to my friends without upsetting them. 

Though I had always been an insomniac, at this point none of my traditional remedies would help me sleep, so I began relying on the usage of a potent antipsychotic called Ketilept (similar to Seroquel) which, for reasons unknown to God or man, is available in Georgia via the delivery app Wolt without a prescription. One night, the stalker sent me a picture of a severed ear from the 2020 war with the caption "DOES SOPHIA LIKE EARRINGS?" I was so upset that night that I tried, and failed, to go to sleep for several hours, and ended up relying on Ketilept. The medication left me groggy and uncoordinated, and I slipped on my way to the bathroom, the fall opening up a gash on my chin large enough to see white sinew and red muscle, covering my chin and neck in blood. Again, my first response was embarrassment; I avoided going to the hospital, covered it with bandaids, and ate with some difficulty for several weeks while my chin healed. The scar is still visible, most of a year later.

I decided I had to tell my family, first my mother, and eventually my sisters. Ellie, who could clearly tell how upset I was that I felt this conversation was necessary, asked a question I probably should have answered at the beginning.

"What's Azerbaijan?"

Unintended Consequences

Eventually a number of people who were being harassed formed a group chat where we collected the work of he who I insisted on calling "Our Boy," rather than Lola Avagyan, after the name used in most of his Twitter handles. We tried to contact Twitter. We tried to contact the press. Nothing worked. I watched Our Boy post in real time once; he managed to send around 150 tweets in two and a half hours. Individualized tweets, with specific, personalized threats and images. Tweeting at that speed would require real physical effort, a visible haste near manic frenzy.

Our Boy was escalating; he would spend entire days tweeting, once threatening to "go Jack the Ripper" on an Armenian woman. It was relatively likely he was an incel and compensating for perceived deficiencies in his life through public and obsessive sexual threats; his entire libido seemed to consist of violent fantasies focusing on Armenian women. Again, the transgression — the public threats, the open display of his fantasies, the humiliation and degradation of innocents — was the primary appeal, with the intimidation of perceived threats only offering a permission structure to live out his increasingly deranged and elaborate fantasy life. 

I began talking with my Azerbaijani friends, many of whom were also being targeted. Most of them sympathized with me, especially after Our Boy began explicitly targeting my sisters, who didn't really know where Azerbaijan was. I somehow ended up with more Azerbaijani friends because of the stalker than I had before this all happened, as many people became invested in finding out who this person was, not least because he so obviously embarassed Azerbaijani Twitter. An Azeri friend joked that "you're a real Caucasian now, you want to avenge your family's honor." Some, however, claimed Our Boy was a plant, with one particularly odious Azerbaijani social media personality claiming I was racist for not knowing that my stalker was an Armenian. The same pattern; the harassment was possible because of the ambiguity afforded by anonymity.

One thing that had been holding me back from more serious writing on the Caucasus, especially relating to Armenia, was the desire to remain relatively anonymous. I would occasionally write on Circassian issues under my own name, or on other topics under a variety of aliases, but given that my sisters were being threatened when I attempted to remain anonymous, I saw little reason not to take my writing and public presence more seriously. I abandoned my pseudonyms and began writing for EVN Report.   

A Lost Horseshoe, A Stolen Tablecloth

I learned to ignore Our Boy. He had difficulties finding ways to contact my sisters, given the fact that both of them had extremely large followings on social media and had dealt with numerous such obsessives. I moved to a new apartment in Tbilisi with a friend of mine I'd met in Vienna, a graduate student from Latin America finishing her thesis in philosophy. The arrangement worked; we lived in a beautiful apartment, she helped me focus and learn to cope with my NVLD, and she benefitted from my obsessive need to make sure foreigners, especially friends, enjoyed themselves in the Caucasus. I spent several months working on a major EVN piece on Azerbaijani pseudoscholarship and irredentism, Baku QAnon, and the article was successful enough that I felt I had more options in my life than I'd imagined possible just a few months before.

One night in December, I was walking out of a screening of Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" when I saw 20 or so panicked messages from my roommate. We had been robbed. She sent pictures, and the apartment was a mess. Furniture was moved. Every cupboard opened. My mind immediately went to stories you'd hear from older journalists and analysts who'd worked in Russia during the Medvedev era; harassment, a threat, but no actual political persecution or violence.

Something seemed off even before I'd run the ten minutes from the theater to the apartment.  We lived in what the Georgians call an "Italiuri Ezo", an Italian courtyard – no actual relation to Italy other than an accidental resemblance – a grand open space over which our neighbors kept watch like Kartvelian owls of Minerva. Our porch has a clear, direct view to one of the most important government buildings in the country. When I entered the apartment, I saw that my iPad was still standing on top of the credenza next to the wardrobe in which I hid my passport amid unsent postcards, but only my passport had been taken. They searched a different chest and took one of my roommate's passports, despite it being more carefully hidden than mine. 

They ignored thousands of dollars worth of other electronics, and seemed to move furniture only so it would be known they had moved furniture. They took my landlady's Soviet-era tablecloth, and bizarrely, also a decorated horseshoe given to me by the owner of a Circassian horse ranch and restaurant called Binef, near Düzce, in western Turkey. That stung more than my passport; I have always tried to understand close-knit, diasporic communities, and the horseshoe was given to me at the end of a memorable evening.

My roommate was confused and upset, but she was tough; she was used to living in a region with more crime than the relatively safe Tbilisi. My initial response was a near-manic confusion: a journalist friend of mine seemed convinced this was related to Baku QAnon, and I laughed uncontrollably with an anxious pride: "this is only my third article!"  For the next few days, I went through a series of mood swings, especially as I realized that those I trusted to know more about transnational repression seemed more, not less, convinced that this was related to my work. I saw multiple attempts at hacking my social media, and immediately changed all my passwords and talked with a number of experts about my digital security. Georgi Derluguian gave me tips on how to avoid being followed. I was simultaneously living out every adolescent dream and adolescent nightmare I ever had.

Eventually, I had to contact the Georgian police, who seemed confused by my (admittedly bohemian) living arrangement but barely interested in the case, apart from repeated attempts to hit on my roommate. I contacted members of the Georgian press but barely anyone seemed interested, even though most Tbilisi expats seemed concerned. A Ukrainian American friend of mine, Alex Gendler, who had been at our apartment only two weeks earlier, decided to use the break-in as the jumping off point for an article at Voice of America. 

Life With Cameras

Before the break-in, I'd planned to write a series of articles on lighter topics. Baku QAnon had been months of arduous research in three languages on a distressing topic, and I planned to write on a series of lighter topics: puppet theater in the Caucasus, the Circassian restaurant Binef, an Armenian-owned meyhane (Turkish tavern) in the traditionally Armenian neighborhood of Pangaltı, in Istanbul. Without a passport, none of that was possible.

I was angry. I'd made my sisters a target, and now my roommate. When she left for Latin America, I was glad that I did not feel responsible for anyone else's safety, even as an empty apartment left me anxious at every random sound in the night.   

There were moments when I blamed myself, moments when I felt unsafe, moments where I wondered what absurd paths my life had taken me down, still others left wondering if what happened was random and it was mere ego on my part to speculate otherwise. I spent what little money I had installing cameras around the apartment. Ultimately, I moved on. 

The reality is that everyone in the Caucasus must now learn to live with these uncertainties. The harassment I've dealt with was possible only because certain actors were willing to transgress norms, be they Twitter's content policies or the Georgian legal code.

My work was not important enough to justify any of the harassment I received. All of this started because a lonely, sick boy thought I was an Armenian woman, which I learned to deal with, and had the unintended effect of convincing me to take my writing more seriously. While Baku QAnon was a success, the reality of the situation is that whatever impact the article had was greatly magnified when the break-in inspired a Voice of America article. 

Harassment made my career. Harassment changed my life, almost entirely for the better. My life, today, is unrecognizable from this time last year, when I wandered western Georgia, trying not to think about my thesis and aimlessly wasting time until I could go back to Turkey or the EU.  After months of harassment, after a break-in, I have a career. 

Past a certain point, harassment becomes its own reward. Our Boy did not threaten to rape or murder for hours of the day because of his love of Azerbaijan; he did it because he enjoyed it. If my apartment was broken into because of my work, I cannot imagine that the intended effect was a Voice of America piece on Azerbaijani transnational repression; someone was angry, that person hired someone else, and my landlady lost her tablecloth. The transgressive act of harassment becomes its own reward not only on a personal level to those who enjoy harassment, but within a broader system that rewards those who harass. Individual acts of harassment become cheerful anecdotes told to superiors, coworkers or compatriots, and those targeted become mere objects to be transgressed.

This systemic transgression is, of course, not only unstable, but a contradiction. The logic of harassment begins with those who, in the words of Akanda Taştekin, a Turkish–Circassian activist and reporter, are in for "their share of brutality." The norms that are transgressed with every act of harassment, however, recede further with each act of harassment, and those who dedicate their lives to transgressive acts of harassment will always find ways to transgress norms even as they recede, and continuously look for new targets. Like Our Boy, they escalate.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

A good read, despite the unsettling nature of the experiences

[Caliga]

Spellus, while weird (which, hell, most of us are too) is a good kid and I always liked him.  But for whatever reason, I find his writing really tough to read.

[Valmy]

Spellus, while weird (which, hell, most of us are too) is a good kid and I always liked him.  But for whatever reason, I find his writing really tough to read.

Heh. He is what? 35 now?

I liked how shocked he was Languish still existed. I am kind of shocked myself.

[Caliga]

I liked how shocked he was Languish still existed. I am kind of shocked myself.

Languish is Eternal.

[Josquius]

Social media threats can be pretty unsettling so can only imagine how horrid it must be with such big ones and the faux burglary.

Fuck Azerbaijan .

[Barrister]

Spellus, while weird (which, hell, most of us are too) is a good kid and I always liked him.  But for whatever reason, I find his writing really tough to read.

Heh. He is what? 35 now?

I liked how shocked he was Languish still existed. I am kind of shocked myself.

Where did he reference that?

[Valmy]

Spellus, while weird (which, hell, most of us are too) is a good kid and I always liked him.  But for whatever reason, I find his writing really tough to read.

Heh. He is what? 35 now?

I liked how shocked he was Languish still existed. I am kind of shocked myself.

Where did he reference that?

In his Facebook response to Raz.

[Duque de Bragança]

Spellus wrote this and posted it on Facebook.  He says "hi" and he turned out mostly okay.

https://evnreport.com/raw-unfiltered/transgression-object-how-a-nice-mormon-boy-made-a-lot-of-azerbaijani-enemies/?fbclid=IwAR2d9N1jgedPJkK6n-eEhdkhECoMUUlp-3WdPPNaKnTerrbwRnBH8fBWmYQ

(...)
Our Boy
Among these faux-German trolls, one stood out. He spoke better German, and knew working class dialectical insults common to areas such as Frankfurt's Offenbach, Neukölln in Berlin, Cologne's Chorweiler, Duisburg, or Vienna's own Favoriten, but what made him truly exceptional, even at this early stage, was his taste for threatening people sexually. He appears to have used the handle "Markus Kristophersen" at an early date, indicating some kind of relationship with the other faux-Germans, but he became fixated on the figure of Lola Avagyan, a pregnant Armenian woman who was raped, mutilated and murdered during the 1988 Sumgait Pogrom. Starting around March 2023, he began harassing me on Twitter, on the assumption that I was an Armenian woman.
(...)

Wow, tough to read indeed.

As an aside, Offenbach described as part of Frankfurt, is sure to elicit reactions from Frankfurters.
It's close to a banlieue perception in France. Technically part of the Greater Frankfurt, not that far, but outside of the Frankfurter Ring.

[Syt]

Becomes quite relevant when it comes to football, though, with Kickers Offenbach being a very storied club (though they haven't been to even 2nd tier in a bit):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickers_Offenbach

[Duque de Bragança]

Precisely, a bit of a PSG pre-QSI (intra-muros) vs Red Star Saint-Ouen (Greater Paris but not intra-muros) thing.

[viper37]

Social media threats can be pretty unsettling so can only imagine how horrid it must be with such big ones and the faux burglary.

Fuck Azerbaijan .

We'll have to create our own Subreddit and sell our soul data to the devil to become relevant.

[jimmy olsen]

Interesting and disturbing article. Glad he's doing okay

[Caliga]

Interesting and disturbing article. Glad he's doing okay

Alarming

[Tamas]

Interesting and disturbing article. Glad he's doing okay

Alarming

Spellus mentioned, Caliga mocking Tim's reaction... felt like Old Languish for a moment.