Rasmus🐢Pallisgaard🐢Nielsen · @HooXiCSGO
14th Feb 2023 from TwitLonger
About photos with flags
I think everyone interested enough to click the link will know what situations I'm about to adress. First thing first before even explaining the situations I want to make clear that non of us supports war or whatever words you might wanna use for what's going on in the world right now. It is horrible and I think every human being with a touch of common sense will have this opinion, so of course the same goes for me and my team.
First situation where we as a team got involved was this photo https://gyazo.com/0b36bbe42e80e5e8668d6ad6589fb1f6
We came back to the hotel (I think after a match) and as we were about to take the elevator to our pracc room we got asked by a few guys in the lobby for a photo. As always we said yes, we always try to give back to our fans whatever small gesture we can for them. Since we kinda got caught out of the blue we were not as aware as we should've been. What I observed was a polite guy wrapped in a flag asking for a photo. The flag was upside down when he had it wrapped around him and I noticed an eagle looking figure so I thought it was a Serbian flag (https://gyazo.com/ab191e044e92ca7b0cc74e84bbdde775) which at the time had no meaning to me. It shouldn't come as a surprise to you guys that we are a bunch of nerds that are just trying our best to compete and have a good time, political conflicts is far beyond us and to be frank I didn't even know Serbia was in any kind of conflict.
Obviously now after the episode I regret that we took the picture since the team and I would never want to be involved in political conflicts.
Now for the situation in Katowice at one of our signing sessions another peaceful looking dude comes up to us to take a picture. This time being at a signing session and having learned from the first episode we were a bit more aware and I took the decision to not take any chances with flags or any other kind of symbols that could indicate political opinion. I politely told him the situation and told him he could get a picture without the flag if he so desired. We had a lot of people waiting in line so I helped him by placing the flag on a desk right next to us while taking the photo. I didn't think much of it and I still don't think anyone did anything wrong in the situation. Now posting it after in the fashion it was done, trying to put me and my teammates in a bad light once again is a different story.
Last thing I want to touch on is the people who's hating on the Russian and Ukranian players having a good relationship taking pictures together at events and so on. Stop going after these people. They have nothing to do with what's going on and if anything I think it shows faith in humanity that we can see beyond that as normal human beings and still have a good relationship because the difference is not where you're from or what you look like but if you are a good person.
This tweetlonger is written by me and only me, this is my view and experience of the situations. I might not be the best with words and I am sure someone will find a way to twist this into something with bad intent, but we will never be able to please everyone and there will always be a loud minority who's going to be out to get you.
Thanks for sticking with me for this wall of text and hopefully this is the last time I will have to talk about this or anything simular.
PEACE <3