By Tomasz Kitlinski, February 26th, 2013 
Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff
February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.
The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.
Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.
While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over . . .
Read more: Michnik Attacked: The Polish Culture War Escalates
By Tomasz Kitlinski, September 17th, 2012 
The Pussy Riot trial will go down in the history of injustices as the Oscar Wilde trial of the 21st century. Against the evil powers that be, the Moscow artists acknowledged their inspirers, fellow outcasts: Socrates (this connection to the martyr of philosophy has been noticed by David Remnick in The New Yorker), early feminist, transgender George Sand, and banished by Stalin, carnival researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin. Pussy Riot performs human rights. These women artists attack authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia In their punk prayer, they protested Putin, the system, discrimination against the second sex, and as they sang, “gay pride exiled in chains to Siberia.” And still many hate them — and because of that they hate them. Why? In Eastern Europe the political class is anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-secular, because our countries have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity: women, minorities, gays, artists to hell!
A formidable oppositionist movement is gaining strength: the supporters of Pussy Riot who don’t want prejudices to rule their life, demonstrations and shows of solidarity in the region and glocally, indignation of PEN Russia, PEN International, rock stars and the media, petitions (spearheaded in Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza by art critic Dorota Jarecka and signed by filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland, curator Anda Rottenberg, Ethical Art professor Krzysztof Wodiczko ). Slovenian and cosmopolitan Slavoj Zizek wrote a letter to Pussy Riot with his characteristic wit: “It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers.”
The brutal sentence on Pussy Riot encapsulates — beyond the headlines — the predicament which women face in Eastern Europe. Women curators in Hungary have been fired, and the world-renowned New School philosopher, Agnes Heller, has also been subject to a witch-hunt. Female artists and cultural operators in Poland have been humiliated. These prejudices are a major stumbling block in the democratic transition — in fact, phobias are destroying our societies. In Russia, women rebels . . .
Read more: Performing Human Rights: Pussy Riot vs. the Pseudo Religious, Homophobic, Misogynists of Eastern Europe
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, February 27th, 2012 
Last night at the Academy Awards, the Iranian film, “A Separation,” won the best foreign film prize. The Polish film, “In Darkness,” did not win, even though it is an important film about the Holocaust. I imagine Malgorzata Bakalarz, a Polish art historian studying sociology in New York, is pleased. -Jeff
I remember the joke among my friends – photographers and filmmakers – repeated each time when someone would read a film review in a newspaper. “Why are all the film critics unemployed in Poland? – Because sociologists and historians write better film reviews. – And why’s that? – Because it’s all about important movies, not the good ones.”
Indeed, “important” is not a formal category for judging a film, and it should not be a category to discuss “In Darkness” by Agnieszka Holland, either. Holland depicts a true story about Leopold Socha, Polish sewage worker, who saved a group of Jews, hiding them in sewage in Lviv (now in Ukraine). And yet many reviewers were terrorized by the importance of the content and do not really address the form. Is it really so that to watch films touching on important issues one needs to become “a patriot,” “a pacifist,” or “anti-Fascist” instead of remaining simply “a viewer”? And why does a critique of a film on Holocaust seem to be anti-Semitic? The terror of “important movies” is truly a noteworthy phenomenon.
“In Darkness” is not a masterpiece, no matter how important its subject. In it, Holland, the distinguished Polish director, is guilty of the sin of excess (or indecisiveness): among many different angles of the story and many ways of telling it – she has chosen everything. The effect is a lot of unnecessary scenes that make the large picture (sic!) blurry. Should we fully recognize the main protagonist’s transformation, from a crook that wants to get rich on others’ tragedy into a righteous gentile? Or, rather, should we meditate on complex dynamics between the group of Jews – fled from the ghetto to be forced to select among themselves the ones who would die, the “selected” fleeing . . .
Read more: The Terror of Important Films: “In Darkness” (Spoiler Alert)
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