1. Art representing Roma, gays and Jews has been banned and destroyed in Lublin, Poland, twice host to Transeuropa Festival. Stop Toleration for Toleration, a far-right soccer hooligan march, with hate speech chants, has lashed back against the social-artistic campaign Lublin for All, led by Szymon Pietrasiewicz. The campaign included bus tickets with the images of national and sexual minorities who have shaped this city for centuries as a hub of Jewish, Romany, Protestant and queer cultures. City Hall, under pressure from the soccer hooligans, censored and shredded this art. As the municipal authorities have caved in to the extreme right, Lublin — it appears — is not welcoming at all.

The destruction of art crushes the human geography of Lublin: this is a blow to the heritage of this intercultural city and to the current art activism working to make Lublin hospitable.

We need to reclaim Lublin from the far-right soccer hooligans. That’s why the ground breaking Holocaust scholars Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton, Poland’s leading feminist Kazimiera Szczuka, and this country’s only out gay MP Robert Biedron have all signed an open letter “Let’s not give Lublin up to intolerance, aggression and social exclusion,” authored by Agnieszka Zietek, a political activist and lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.

2. “Lublin free of fags!” “Run Pietrasiewicz out of Lublin!” “F … Gazeta Wyborcza [Poland’s progressive newspaper]!” “A boy and a girl are a normal family!” “Lublin, a city without deviations!” These were the chants of the soccer hooligan marchers. As editor-in-chief of the local branch of the Gazeta Wyborcza broadsheet Malgorzata Bielecka-Holda writes, the catcalls were received with sympathy by City Hall. This is just one element of the rise of the far right in Lublin. Other ominous developments: the mobilization of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the hosting of these Brown Shirts by the local Solidarność trade union, evictions and layoffs of the underprivileged, the predicament of refugees and women, refusing abortion to the fourteen-year-old rape victim Agata, and attacks on those who are reviving Jewish life.

3. Activist for Jewish Lublin, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, 57, has been assaulted with swastikas sprayed on his flat and with an explosive device. In 1990, he established Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre, devoted to the commemoration of Jewish culture in Lublin through plays, exhibitions, a publishing house and workshops for high-school students. Pietrasiewicz was also attacked with anti-Semitic posters that were pasted in his block of flats and in bus stops throughout Lublin. The perpetrators have not been found. As Pawel P. Reszka reported in Gazeta Wyborcza, the National Radical Camp (ONR), at a press conference hosted by Solidarność, insinuated that Pietrasiewicz attacked himself.

4. In 2006 Tomasz’s son, Szymon founded Tektura Space for Creative Activities, a squat with concerts, exhibitions and campaigns for human rights, women, LGBT, the homeless and seniors. This alternative collective opposes consumerism and neo-Nazism. Tektura is often threatened by skinhead raids, but, significantly, it is also not respected by economic neoliberals because of its stance for fair trade, the redistribution of goods and social justice, countering Poland’s widespread belief in the infallibility of the free market.

5. This year Szymon Pietrasiewicz started the Studio for Socially Engaged Art Rewiry, responsible for the campaign Lublin for All. The Rewiry has worked intensively in the deprived areas of Lublin, involving their residents in art activism. Pietrasiewicz’s Studio has also invited such artists as Joanna Rajkowska and Rafal Betlejemski to work with the local residents. The Rewiry is planning to bring the representatives of the international scene like David Cerny as well as Svajone and Paulius Stanikas to Lublin, too.

6. Tomasz Pietrasiewicz was a dissident in the 1980s, active in alternative theatre and underground publishing. Now two generations of nonconformists run the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and Tektura that champion independent culture. NN and Tektura hosted Transeuropa Festival which foregrounded LGBT, intercultural Lublin and refugees.

7. Chechen asylum seekers have told us at Transeuropa Lublin that they don’t feel that they’re treated as human beings here. A country of traditional emigration, Poland doesn’t welcome refugees. In October 2012 over 70 refugees in detention centers throughout Poland held a hunger strike against the legal and material conditions to which they had been condemned. A woman journalist from Georgia, Ekaterina Lemondzawa, wrote a dramatic letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, in which she described the humiliations that she had been subjected to as a refugee in Poland. The broadsheet later reported: “Poland is allegedly the only country in the European Union, where refugees, including children, being held for months in detention centers, are called from their rooms by whistle to stand at attention.” Helsinki Human Rights Foundation representative Karolina Rusilowicz confirms that “these detention centers hold a penitentiary regime.”

At Transeuropa Festival, Chechen refugees shared their problems — in fact hardships — with us. Generally, asylum-seeking should be decriminalized and immigration facilitated in the European Union. Migrants and refugees must not be treated as criminals. The Seyla Benhabib-inspired Lublin political scientist Sylwia Nadgrodkiewicz writes that one needs to go beyond the logic of exclusion in order to make immigration easier.

8. International experts, in a report on Lublin as an intercultural city, indicated that refugees should be more visible in this city. Szymon Pietrasiewicz’s campaign Lublin for All attempts to present Lublin’s coexistence of different cultures and the need for acceptance and cooperation; these images embody the ethics and aesthetics of diversity and equality. The censorship, ban and destruction of the bus tickets hurt the cause for an open Lublin.

9. The art expert and political economist Mikolaj Iwanski writes ironically: “Lublin’s leadership have begun a race to see who can condemn the action [Lublin for All] faster … It turns out that a smiling black man shouting Motor [the name of the club] is a deadly threat to the city, to this second-league club and to the municipal transportation.” On a serious note, Iwanski adds that “anti-Semitism, homophobia and ethnic prejudices are still present in Polish stadiums.” The Lublin area is very poor. Amidst economic hardships, scapegoating, conspiracy theories and prejudices are rampant.

10. Submitting to the far right could not be more dangerous here. That is why an MP Michal Kabacinski, 24, protested against Lublin City Hall’s submission to the soccer hooligans. “The mayor has failed to respond to these events. This was show of hate speech, a presentation of anti-Semitic and xenophobic positions. A scandal. We must not accept these events.” On the door of Lublin city hall Kabacinski hung a picture of the mayor next to a portrait of Adolf Hitler and an image of the Ku Klux Klan. The MP explained how he had intended to demonstrate that City Hall agrees with the promotion of ideologies which these figures represent.

11. Lublin has been a city of women, minorities and migrants. Let us remember the residents of Lublin: Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Scots. Nowadays we must encourage contemporary migrants, including economic ones. Lubliners have enjoyed hospitality abroad, and metaphysically we are all migrants to this world. We must not allow prejudices in our region — that is why social change is badly needed. Let’s find within ourselves more than toleration: acceptance, more than integration: recognizing otherness as value, more than dialogue: cooperation among cultures. Zygmunt Bauman recently spoke about such a collaboration at both the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

Angry young Poles are protesting online and on the streets  in the biggest demonstrations since 1989. The pretext is the government’s signing of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which jeopardizes Internet freedom. But there are more reasons for our fury: a transition which has strengthened economic inequalities and lack of perspectives for the younger generation. As sociologist Adam Ostolski writes, “Life in Poland is getting harder, the privatization-by-stealth of health services and education is going on, the prices of municipal services and staple foods are rising. Poland is now the leading country in Europe in terms of non-permanent job contracts.” Hence social anger today. Are the protests changing into a civil society movement, a Solidarity 2.0? We hope that this defiant and militant mobilization will not exclude migrants and minorities. An optimistic sign is that alternative collectives (Rozbrat in Poznan and Tektura in Lublin) are at the forefront of these events where ordinary people in Poland are demanding their rights – at last.

Poland has transitioned from fake Communism (the unrealized Marxist ideal) to turbo capitalism-cum-fake Christianity, as a religion has been instrumentalized into political anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-foreigner hatred. The economic transformation is sold as a success story, but, in fact, the situation of many groups of the population has worsened. Social justice, an empty concept under East European “socialism,” has become a dirty phrase. It’s a taboo to pronounce it, let alone practice it. Poles have been Foucault’s docile bodies of commercialization and corporatization. Until today’s wrath.

Still, the political class here believes in discipline and profit – and prejudices.  The ACTA treaty was signed by the Polish government without social consultations. When the protests broke out, the first reaction of the leaders was to deny them. Later, head of the National Security Bureau, General Koziej, claimed that he wouldn’t exclude introducing emergency measures if the cyber attacks continued. When the Parliamentary Committee on Innovation was meeting to discuss ACTA, a Law and Justice (the rightist opposition party) lawmaker, Michal Suski, referred to black MP John Godson as a “little Negro” in another example of ugly racism in this country. Transphobia also occurred when MP Jan Dziedziczak called transgender parliamentarian Anna Grodzka “Pan”/“Mr”, a direct insult because she is a woman after having undergone transsexual surgery.

But some leading figures of public life have supported the protests. The legend of the Helsinki Foundation, Halina Bortnowska, and Poland’s first ombudsman, Ewa Letowska, said on Tok fm Radio that the government should listen to the protests. All across the country, in fifty cities and towns, mass demonstrations have taken place. In Cracow, 15,000, and in Poznan, 5,000 people took to the streets, convening in the medieval market square where anarchists were very active – Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper ran a lead article about the demo titled: “There hasn’t been such a demonstration in Poznan for years.”

At a rally in Lublin, an anarchist drum circle was attacked by the far righters with roots in Poland’s interwar anti-Semitism. Such extremist factions want to capitalize on the protests, but they are not at the heart of the events. Rather, it is Anonymous hacktivists and various leftist organizations who have taken hold. Originally, the Social Democratic Alliance was the only political party against ACTA, but now the self-styled “moral majority” Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski has attempted to co-opt this movement for its own designs. The MPs of the progressive Palikot Movement have now supported the protests, wearing the Guy Fawkes V masks in parliament, an international sign of dissent that is finally catching on in this country.

In fact, it is a popular movement – from below. A placard designed as a tombstone, “Liberty. Died Young 1989-2012,” attests to a failure of post-communist Poland. The determination of the protesters is evidenced in the strong language that has been used online and on the streets. In a demonstration in front of the newly-opened Warsaw’s National Stadium, a banner read: “Jestesmy wkurwieni”/“We’re fucking cross”/“We’re pissed off.”

Is this more than a fit of aggression? This is an open revolt, an expansion of action which had been at the margins of public life. Until now, Polish young people have expressed their social discontent in art as activism, the feminist and LGBT movement, and the Greens’ and Krytyka Polityczna milieu. Today, it is a societal protest against ACTA, but also against joblessness, low wages and rising costs. We also demand participation in democracy when the young feel powerless. Active civil society is awakening. Journalist Jacek Zakowski may have hyperbolized, “We are dealing with a historical change on a scale similar to the United States when slavery was abolished. Access to culture requires a similar emancipation.” Free expression in the Internet is indeed the young’s participation in culture – and in politics. The lack of debate on ACTA in Poland revealed an enormous gap between leadership and populace and what we called back then under real “socialism:” the arrogance of the authorities.

After 1989, the ideals of the dissident Workers’ Defense Committee and of the oppositionist theater movement were abandoned. What we want is broad social justice, self-organization of society (as in the anarchist streak in the pre-1989 opposition, diagnosed by David Ost). The aims in the anti-establishment alternative were participatory democracy, student movement, worker self-management, mutiny against marketization. Let’s continue this post-1968 pre-1989 anti-authoritarian project, as defined by Adam Michnik. As a transfer of power and wealth was made with the fall of “communism,” we lost social protection. Privatisation and commodification have alienated students and workers. The former Solidarity unionists have betrayed the labor issues and joined the economically liberal agenda and the morally illiberal one: an abortion ban and homophobia.

Solidarity has been destroyed by ultranationalism and, all in all, a majoritaritarian spirit. It has ignored or even denigrated minorities. This is where a dangerous concept was coined: “true Poles.”  A commentator has called the current protests “the most authentic citizens’ movement.” Citizens? Are minorities and migrants excluded again? The rising far right must not be part of the movement. We’ve had enough of business-suited skinheads in the leadership when the chauvinist League of Polish Families was in government.

The protests in Poland are a call to action. We all have a responsibility now. ACTA can restrict Internet openness, endanger generic pharmaceuticals and strengthen corporations – the unfair banality of post-modernism. And today’s outrage in Eastern Europe protests the brutality of post-communism.