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 the years, in fact an antagonism that dates back to the inter-war period. Michnik also refers to Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska: quick-witted, unsentimental and impatient with chauvinist clichés. When she died a year ago, on February 1, 2012, the nationalist MP and Law Professor Krystyna Pawlowicz said on Polish Radio: “I don’t associate Szymborska with Poland.”

A group of young writers protested against this xenophobic comment. Michnik wrote that Szymborska zdążyła przestrzec nas przed nienawiścią (managed to warn us against hate). And in Eastern Europe we badly need this warning, as the event last Saturday reminds us.

Outright hatred characterizes Poland’s ethno-nationalism, which combines with misogyny and homophobia. During a parliamentary debate over same-sex unions this month,  Pawlowicz continued her prejudiced discourse, labeling the LGBT community sterile people of no benefit to society and derided, lampooned and insulted the transgender MP Anna Grodzka. Nigerian-born and bred journalist Remi Adekoya wrote in The Guardian: “As a whole, modern-day “Poland is still a conservative, homogenous society, uncomfortable with minorities – be they sexual, ethnic or religious.”

In Poland, poets have played a political role since Romanticism or even the Baroque. Poetry is the cultivation of inner life and revolt; particularly in Eastern Europe, writing and reading has often encouraged social critique and — sometimes — change. (Banned authors!)

Poets here were silenced under totalitarianism and also under a far-right government in the recent past. Roman Giertych, who served as Minister of Education 2006-7, revived the All-Polish Youth with its interwar anti-Semitism and attempted to delete the eminent writer Witold Gombrowicz (a post-modernist avant la lettre) from school curricula because of his queerness. This was a nadir of democracy here, which Adam Michnik described as “The Polish Witch-Hunt.”

That’s why the poetry and political stances of the two Nobel Prize winners for literature, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, are of special significance. Both opposed conformity and chauvinism. As a student in intercultural Vilnius, Milosz intervened against an anti-Semitic rally of the All-Polish Youth militia. He translated Yiddish poetry (through a philological rendering of the text), and in his novel The Issa Valley he focused on his anti-feudal pacifist ancestors from the radical Reformation (Socinians). After World War II, Milosz and Szymborska welcomed the new system which promised equality. She became a party member. He served as a diplomat for the People’s Republic of Poland. Although Milosz soon defected, and Szymborska joined the opposition, they remained progressive until their last days. Just before Milosz’s death, they both signed a petition in defense of a feminist and gay pride in Cracow (Toleration March).

Milosz was a critic of capitalism. As a leader of the current leftist Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) movement, Slawomir Sierakowski, reminds us, Milosz was a critic of a society subordinated to the market. Right now  Krytyka Polityczna is publishing Milosz’s unknown and unfinished novel Gory Parnasu, a political fiction. His vision of a robotized and demoralized technocracy places this important new publication alongside the poet’s classic reckoning with communism in The Captive Mind.

After Milosz’s death in 2004, the All-Polish Youth was responsible for a hate campaign against the writer. They accused him of not being a “true Pole,” but rather a “friend of Jews and sodomites.” He was characterized as suspicious, dangerous, anti-Polish. In his poetry, Czeslaw Milosz explored the guilt that Poles have towards the Other. I am particularly moved and touched by his poem “Campo di Fiori,” in which Milosz depicts the indifference of Warsaw residents toward the death and suffering in the Jewish ghetto. The poet diagnosed the failure to admit Poland’s guilt; he wrote of his compatriots as “ill with their own innocence.” This verse from his poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” was quoted by the then All-Polish Youth leader, Krzysztof Bosak (currently part of the newly formed National Movement), in the official statement of this organization, as “deeply offensive to us.”

Szymborska’s death in February 2012 also evoked hostility: she was vilified as a cosmopolitan intellectual indifferent to Polishness. As mentioned, the MP and Professor of Law, Krystyna Pawlowicz, insulted Szymborska’s memory, and now she mocks same-sex unions and transgenderism. Academics, including the leading conservative historian of ideas Marcin Krol, the expert on anti-Semitism, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the feminists Magda Sroda and Malgorzata Fuszara, the queer scholar Jacek Kochanowski, and the LGBT art curator Pawel Leszkowicz, gathered together to protest against Pawlowicz’s homo- and transphobia.

Exactly twenty years ago abortion was criminalized in Poland; this 1993 law still crushes women’s rights. Ten years ago, a landmark lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen was vandalized. Pawel Leszkowicz and I participated in this campaign and describe it in our chapter for a Routledge book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant.

Under Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza has become a major force in the support of LGBT rights under the pen of eminent journalists such as Ewa Siedlecka, Dorota Jarecka and Piotr Pacewicz; the latter went as far as joining the Warsaw Gay Pride in drag! The Lublin branch of Gazeta regularly publishes reportages on homophobia and anti-Semitism by Pawel P. Reszka.

The  filmmaker, author of the Oscar-nominated movie about a Polish working-class saver of a group of Lviv Jews In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland, defined the current prejudiced behaviors in this country as “humiliating, excluding and scorning.” In a recent interview for the Polish edition of Newsweek, Holland, whose father was a Jewish intellectual, said: “It seems to me that the Jew has been exchanged for the homosexual.”

In 2004, the Szymborska and Milosz-supported Toleration March was assaulted with stones, bottles and caustic acid by far-right counter-demonstrators. As a protest against violence, young sociologists Adam Ostolski and Michal Bilewicz wrote an open letter signed, by 1200 people, which diagnosed lesbians and gays as being seen as “the pariahs of Polish democracy.” Later, Green politician, Ostolski, demonstrated parallels between Poland’s inter-war anti-Jewish policies and the current anti-LGBT prejudices. This insight was developed by analyst and activist Greg Czarnecki in his article “Analogies of Pre-War Anti-Semitism and Present-Day Homophobia in Poland” The ultranationalist attack on minorities and poetry continues.

I cherish Szymborska’s poem “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”: it stings us from complacency and its drastic imagery approaches the unspeakable. At this death camp the inmates ”sang, with dirt in their mouth… Write how quiet it is,” the poet adds. Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton rightly calls Szymborska’s work “Still” “one of the most shocking poems on the Holocaust.” It also warns against anti-Semitism after the war and states how prejudiced views of Jewish names continue: “Let your son have a Slavic name.”

The writings of the two poets were a protest against prejudice, social ills and violence. Szymborska depicted the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. Milosz dedicated a study to Poland’s rare leftist thinker Stanislaw Brzozowski and a book of memories to the conflicts and repressions of the interwar period here. He also authored a book on a poet of affectivity, linguistic genius, esprit and (early!) feminism, and a Warsaw Uprising fighter Anna Swir Swirszczynska.

Both poets accompanied us through the difficult post-1989 transition: Milosz warned against the triumphalism of the church, although he valued religion as a cultural phenomenon, translated the Bible as well as the mystic and workers’ activist and worker herself, Simone Weil.

Elzbieta Matynia of the New School invited Czeslaw Milosz to the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, where he often read not only his own poems, but also those of Szymborska. In 1999 I moderated a meeting with Milosz and international students of this Institute, during which his poetry reading healed rifts between Kosovar and Serbian participants in the audience.

And Szymborska, although less of a public figure, sent her pithy and disturbing poem “Hatred” to Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, when the country was faced with the threat of a rightist coup d’état: she wrote that hatred has a “grimace / of erotic ecstasy” and a “sniper’s keen sight” (to quote the translation of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak).

In their openness, Szymborska celebrated the male nude whereas Milosz cultivated the memory of Lublin’s gay poet Czechowicz, and wrote openly and approvingly of his homosexuality. Born in the puritan first decades of the twentieth century, they both proved to be progressive in sexual politics (middle-aged poets here are still in the Middle Ages!). In Poland, the visual arts equal activism:  in particular women’s and LGBT art create a splash. But Szymborska and Milosz, who drew on the avant-garde and produced popular poetry, contributed to the democratization of our post-Communist country. Their writings wake us from the slumber of national pride.

Resentment, conspiracy theories, the Great Lustrator, as Michnik puns on the Grand Inquisitor in his book In Search of Lost Meaning, rule Poland. In my view, prejudices have increased as the transition has lost its way, excluding so many people economically. The fight for minority rights must not overlook the plight of the underprivileged. That’s why we protested the layoff of 400 women workers in Lublin – and we succeeded. But all too often unemployment is wreaking havoc, as in Radom. Therefore, as Gazeta reports, in his lecture there Adam Michnik spoke about how the market economy has unleashed terrible social inequality.

In my view, it’s in the dispossessed of the transition that the far right finds its converts who are made to believe by the demoralized ultraconservative political class in an imaginary purity of the nation, from which all minorities are to be forbidden: Jews, Roma, LGBT and feminists are othered and rejected. We are not “one of our own” in Polish culture; according to the extremists, we do not belong here. After an anti-fascist interview I gave, a critical commenter declared: “Kitlinski, you’re a stranger.”

The poetry of Milosz and Szymborska has been important to the political philosophy and praxis of Adam Michnik. Expert on Eastern Europe Roger Cohen has written on Michnik in The New York Times:

“He was ever the provocateur, this Polish Jew whose paternal family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust. This Polish patriot. This crazy, proud Pole with the low-slung jeans that cry out for a belt, the hair conscientiously uncombed, the Polish-Latin lover’s stubble and the mind that is anything but sloppy. As he provoked, he probed: the totalitarian mind was always a target for him, even in its fathomless grayness.”

Now Adam Michnik probes the old-new prejudices  of our region of Europe. Ever with courage and wit, he challenges ethno-nationalism. His is a badly needed idea of liberty. With a full awareness of his roots in poetry, imagination and decency, I deplore the violence against his lecture in Radom.

The Pussy Riot trial will go down in the history of injustices as the Oscar Wilde trial of the 21^st 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 are being killed: countless Chechen women, the human rights activist Galina Starovoytova, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the conceptual artist Anna Alchuk. When Alchuk was on trial for her art exhibit at the Sakharov Center, crowds surrounding the Taganka Court chanted “Go to Israel!”

During their trial, Pussy Riot sat locked in a cage that was originally built for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now incarcerated in a penal colony. Anti-Semitism permeated accusations again him. The prejudices against Pussy Riot bring back to life the anti-Jewish anti-intelligentsia bias from the Soviet times. Conceptual artist “Kabakov had to endure not only the difficulties faced by all Soviet citizens, but the additional burdens of living in a society hostile to Jews,” wrote Susan Tumarkin Goodman of the Jewish Museum. Pussy Riot makes the silent deconstructive style of Ilya Kabakov not only rude, but carnivalesque, Bakhtinian, bad!

Pussy Riot performed against Putin and about “the Lord’s shit” and “Mary the feminist.” I admire their all-women and queered activism, esthetics and ethics in opposition to the Russian system, to consumerism, to the unjust world order. To fight for our freedom from tyranny-misogyny-art-phobia, Pussy Riot forms a civil society badly in need of swear words, shock tactics and punk prayer. Their viscerally performative power is sophisticated and draws on philosophy and literature: from Montaigne to Judith Butler to Zizek. They sing wryly, not forgetting Derrida’s title Spectres de Marx, “Specters of Zizek washed away in the toilets.”

Pussy Riot continues the Bakhtinian tradition of holy folly and combines it with the explosiveness of punk. Esthetics for them is ethics, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky and Brodsky and Szymborska (who recalled the equation in her Nobel Prize ceremony). Theirs is a Bakhtinian and a Kristevan madcap, topsy-turvy and humanitarian ethics: an ethics of human rights. Pussy Riot combines feminist and queer art as postulated in Seeing Differently by Amelia Jones. Iconographically and ideologically, the collective reminds me of women’s and LGBT visibility campaigns. Theirs is a socially engaged art as activism, which I’ve described as a new dissident civil society against the “moral majority.”

The women of Pussy Riot are the undesirables of our region: they incarnate nonconformity, protest against autocracy, sexual otherness. At the cathedral, they sang of the predicament of women in Russia, of the forbidden gay prides (Moscow courts have just forbidden queer pride parades for a hundred years!).

Maria Alyokhina told the judge during her closing statement: “I am not afraid of you and I am not afraid of the thinly veneered deceit of your verdict at this ‘so-called’ trial.” Nadia Tolokonnikova thinks subversively in the spirit of Socrates and Montaigne. Katya Samutsevich supports LGBT: “She has called particular attention to the plight of LGBT people in Russia, where official discrimination against so-called ‘sexual minorities’ is growing.” In a song released during the trial, Pussy Riot satirize a botoxed Putin and invite him to marry Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Same sex marriage for the tyrants.

In Eastern Europe, we’re not only anti-women, anti-minority and anti-secular: we are also anti-art. The women of Pussy Riot are performance artists. And as we know, artists always make trouble. That’s why they have been condemned for disrupting the public order. Homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia are countered by art. The women of Pussy Riot join many other women artists. Together they are dissidents and engaged performative actors in the public sphere, fighting a very tough and significant battle. Pawel Leszkowicz has called this art Women’s Revolt, “new art in the new state.” He tells a story of censored works created after 1989.

In Poland: the art of Alicja Zebrowska, Katarzyna Kozyra, Dorota Nieznalska and Zofia Kulik shows the religious and political pressure imposed on the body in the post-communist Poland of illegal abortion, vulnerability of women to unemployment and generally economic exclusions, sex business and phallocentrism. The artists expose and subvert the visual politics of patriarchy and the structure of gender norms. For her installation Passion which consists of a hanging metal cross with photographs of male genitalia and a video of the suffering face of an exercising body builder, a powerful study of masochistic masculinity, Dorota Nieznalska was sued and sentenced.

Nieznalska’s feminist intervention through the radical gesture highlighting the sex of Christ is at the same time a reference to Leo Steinberg’s study Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and its Modern Oblivion. Drawing on traditional religious representations, Steinberg brings to light the exposing of the penis of Jesus. Steinberg argues that the motif of ostentatio genitalium and the sexuality of Jesus is akin to displaying the wounds after the Passion, as it foregrounds the human aspect of Christ, his incarnation.

The League of Polish Families members attacked Nieznalska verbally and physically at the Gdansk gallery where her installation was being exhibited. In July 2003, a Gdansk court found Nieznalska guilty of “offending religious feelings.” It sentenced her to half a year of “restriction of freedom” (she was specifically banned from leaving the country) and ordered her to do work for a Catholic charity and pay all trial expenses. For a long time national venues refused to show her work, but Agata Jakubowska curated her one-woman show Submission and Pawel Leszkowicz featured her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and GK Collection. Currently Nieznalska supports the convicted women of Pussy Riot in the Gazeta Wyborcza’s appeal for them.

Because of the censorship imposed on art and on women and minority rights, a second revolution must happen in Poland. The first one in the 1980s, under the banner of Solidarity, was conducted in the name of the free nation and the collapse of communism. The group identity of Poles stands behind it. A second revolution, equally peaceful, should happen in the name of the freedom of women and minorities rights, opposing the danger of fundamentalism.

Abortion is illegal in Poland and calls to restrict the reproductive rights of women resonate throughout the region. A number of cultural and economic constraints are also still in place against women. This anti-art, anti-women domination underscores how post-Communist ultra nationalism blended with religion turned into an instrument of power.

Feudal serfdom survived in Russia and Poland until the 1860s: seniority, humiliations, civic sadomasochism are still intact. The revolt of 1989 was more of a restoration of the status quo ante,  of pre-Communist inequality. The transition taking place in post-Communist countries has now turned ultra-nationalist, as the majority discourse dehumanizes “Others.” The body politic privileges sexual sameness and a one-and-only model of the human: heterosexist, jingoist, fundamentalist. There are “so many devious ways of refusing the claims of humanity,” argues Martha C. Nussbaum. In her book From Disgust to Humanity Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law Nussbaum is also one of the rare western observers to note the homophobia here. She comments perceptively: “Poland, by contrast [to the rest of the EU] still has a great deal of intense antigay feeling, as does Russia.”

The women artists intervene provocatively and shamelessly in the public sphere. Their brouhahas have a serious political message, are ludic, but not ludicrous, dignified, albeit breaking decorum, impertinent and pertinent alike. Pussy Riot neglects neither transgression nor sublimation – for they cure society, heal the ills of us all. The divine represents alterity itself, the most other otherness, and has nothing to do with national identity. Whereas in Poland or Russia the altar joins the throne in an officially holy but, in fact, unholy alliance, it is Pussy Riot who reclaim Mary-Miriam, Maryam (as she is called in the Koran).

Our anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-art prejudices have condemned and punished Pussy Riot. We’ve all sentenced Pussy Riot to the gulag. But Pussy Riot is triumphing now over tyranny, over hatred. Pussy Riot’s Socratic Apology in court is a new beginning. Eastern Europe needs this renewal – desperately.

Ms. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legendary dissident in charge of the human rights NGO the Moscow Helsinki group told Reuters on the Pussy Riot trial: “As in most politically motivated cases, this court is not in line with the law, common sense or mercy.” Professor Piotr Piotrowski who has postmodernized art history in Eastern Europe wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza: “We must protest this repressive politics; we must defend human rights and freedom of expression everywhere where these values are threatened. Solidarity with the prosecute women artists is our moral obligation.”

It is our duty to demand immediate freedom for Pussy Riot and for all other prisoners of conscience throughout the world. It is our duty to intensify solidarity with all persecuted artists.