In response to threats made by right-wing “patriot” hooligans to interrupt the grand ceremony, Zygmunt Bauman has recently rejected the honoris causa degree he was to be awarded by the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw. He said he did not want to cause any more trouble after his lecture had been interrupted in June by a crowd of young aggressive men, shouting out nationalist and xenophobic slogans. They are becoming a disturbingly familiar sight in large Polish cities. In their eyes, Bauman is not a famous scholar, but a Jewish Communist collaborator, a disgrace to the Polish nation. He is probably the biggest Polish name in the social sciences since Florian Znaniecki, and far more popular than are the hooligans. His books can be found in most trendy bookstores around the world. The university decided to grant him the degree against the “patriotic storm,” but given the swirling controversy, to cancel the customary lecture. The decision was cheered by some commentators, while others accused the institution of exploiting the scholar’s name for its own benefit.

Indeed, Bauman’s past as an officer of the Polish Communist army in the Stalinist period, a time remembered for painful repressions and murders of anti-Communist war heroes, raises questions. In fact, one of the major Polish universities initially wanted to grant Bauman an honorary degree in the mid-2000s, only to ax it when a number of scholars voiced their disapproval. The simple explanation is envy, but Bauman’s past is deeply troubling. His interview, conducted still in 2010, but published in the main Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza a week after the interrupted lecture, explained his involvement in Communist structures as a young man’s infatuation with ideology, but given his close ties to the apparatus of violence, the answers felt to many to be too easy.

The question is, how do you judge outstanding scholars (or artists, or politicians, etc.) who have complicated pasts? According to popular Polish imagination, the nation’s famous figures should be flawless. They are to be “monuments more durable than bronze,” as Horace once described poets. The effect of such impossible standards is twofold: on the one hand, the person’s supporters hide information that could tarnish the perfect image. On the other, the opponents do everything to demonize the person. What is lost is the actual human being. A vivid example of how destructive this approach can be both for the idolized figure, and for people who conceal his less-than-perfect deeds, is the scandal that broke out in the Gazeta Wyborcza after a posthumous biography of Ryszard Kapuściński by a journalist from the daily revealed that some of Kapuściński’s documentaries were, in fact, fiction. The messenger was accused of slandering a dead hero.

Another question is how are people to remember a person brilliant in one particular field, but questionable in others? Given the popular Polish black-and-white approach, this is an intolerable conflict that has to be either ignored or erased, by turning the person either into a saint or a demon. Particularly the latter has been visible in the recent years, largely thanks the Institute of National Remembrance, founded in 1999. It is most famous for housing Communist archives and conducting biased investigations on Communist-era “secret collaborators,” which turned into witch-hunts against political dissidents, such as the symbol of “Solidarity,” Lech Wałęsa, critical of the right-wing PiS (Law and Justice) party. The institute’s investigations set the tone of public debate: “us” vs. “them,” and the atmosphere has not changed much in over a decade.

Bauman’s position in popular Polish imagination was unfavorable from the beginning: he was a Communist and he is Jewish, which are the two worst insults one can hear in Poland. What’s more, the fact that he is a world-famous scholar appears to be more trouble than reason to be proud, because only some believe he should be honored as an academic. It is far easier to claim that he should be condemned as a person. In the popular debate, the two aspects are impossible to separate, and refraining from judgment is beyond thinkable. Thus, while the dominant belief is that the Polish Hall of Fame should be filled with saint-like figures, instead it is a proverbial “Polish hell” of accusations thrown against the potential candidates.

If one looks at this particular conflict over moral purity from a pragmatic point of view, it is Poland, not Bauman, which loses on the international scale. But in the Polish imagination the nation’s assets are not based on sound judgment, but on superficial moralism. This delusional hypocrisy fosters extremisms based on groundless beliefs, making actual discussion increasingly difficult. In this sense, the case of Bauman is another vivid illustration of the growing impossibility of shaping nuanced opinions in key debates in Poland, a society divided into simplistic “us” and “them,” dissidents and Communists, patriots and traitors. And this is to be found not only at the extreme margin, but more tragically at the very center of public life, as the dishonoring of Zygmunt Bauman reveals.

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.

I am concerned. There is a significant threat to democracy in Hungary and few are paying attention in this country. A member state of the European Union may be transitioning from democracy, as Andras Bozoki warned here months ago, but there has been almost no reporting about the developments in the serious press in the U.S., let alone in the popular media, even though it’s a big story in Europe.

I did hear a report on National Public Radio the other day about the economic problems Hungary is having in its relationship with the European Union, but not about the disturbing political developments that a distinguished group of former dissidents criticized in their public letter, which we (along with many other sites) posted last week. There have been reports of mass demonstration in Budapest. But these provided little explanation and no follow up. It just fit into the year of the protestor story line.

I suppose that this may just be an indication that Europe is becoming a small corner of the new global order, not necessarily demanding close attention. Am I being Eurocentric in my conviction that this is an important story? Yet, very important issues are on the line, important for the Hungary and the region, but also of broader significance. The slow development of authoritarianism is a global theme with local variations, which need to be deliberately considered.

I have been informed by a circle of young Polish intellectuals working at the on line weekly, Kultura Liberalna.  They recently published a special issue posing the question: “Should Hungary be excluded from the European Union?” They provide different perspectives and insight. Here are some highlights. The complete pieces now can be read on the weekly’s site in English.

The European controversies started with changed media law, at the center of the anti-democratic developments. Dominika Bychawska–Siniarska in her piece, “Attempt on Democracy,” highlights the basic problem as seen from Poland:

“Freedom of speech is the fundamental element of democratic society. The post-communist states are particularly obliged to respect and fully implement that freedom. Enactment of a media act which raises severe objections as to the international standards of freedom of speech should be perceived as a regression in the democratic transformation in Hungary.”

Adam Bodnar recognized the shared experiences of Poles with Hungarians, observing that the path Hungary is now on resembles earlier developments in Poland:

“[Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán has achieved something that [the former Polish Prime Minister] Jaroslaw Kaczynski only dreamed about. Step by step he gained more and more control to finally fulfill the process of taking over power by liquidating the main opposition.”

He then gives an overview of the historical process and the contours of the consequences for democracy:

“In … the middle of Europe we have a country – a member of the European Union- which has stopped being democratic. There is a facade, one can demonstrate and use the internet, the opposition leaders are not yet retained or arrested, but there is no pluralism in the parliament, control institution‘s and jurisdiction‘s voice was taken away and the opposition is excluded from having any influence on the state. In a moment political trials might begin.”

And he issues a call for Polish action:

“Poland cannot promote democracy, rightful rule and human rights among the Eastern Partnership or Arabic countries, if it neglects a creation of an authoritarian system in a Eastern Europe country, which is mentally so close to us. Maybe gestures of solidarity will not change a lot, but one cannot remain indifferent, because if similar processes happened to us, we would also expect a reaction of other states, politicians, political parties and prominent foreign communities.”

In her contribution, “Viktor Orbán: Dismantling Democracy,” Magdalena M. Baran concluded:

“When we couple the pre-holiday legislation with the recent decisions limiting the freedom of the media, such as revoking the pro-opposition Klubrádió radio station’s license, or banning the index.hu website’s reporters from entering the parliament, it is hard not to observe that Hungarian democracy indeed is not faring too well. This is not the first time that Orbán’s political fireworks explode in the New Year sky. But clearly, Hungarians are no longer blinded by the shimmering stars, and instead are beginning to notice that this is no grand celebration ushering in the carnival season. Rather, they see that this is chaos –  that the ash settling over their country will be hard to clear, that the smoke left behind by the sparklers carries an unbearable stench, and that they have more to lose than to gain from allowing this irresponsible toying with fire to continue.”

Piotr Wciślik, in “Something Worse than a Dictatorship: Viktatorship,” warns that by centralizing power and making controlling checks and balances, while still permitting popular voting, the consequence of the anti-democratic turn may lead to a top down anarchy:

“Can one speak of a dictatorship? No, things are even worse. In principle, despite Orbán’s authoritarian style of governance, the constitutional guarantees of a democratic way of changing the government still persist. Nevertheless, even if Orbán goes, his departure can result in something worse than a dictatorship: a state of non-governability, a political impasse. Thus, paradoxically, and by way of unintended consequences, the tendency of the Regime of National Cooperation towards concentrating all power in a few hands, can lead to a sort of bizarre anarchy from above.”

Kacper Szulecki, an editor at Kultura Liberalna, published a piece that first appeared in the major Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. He understands the piece to be a part of a transnational debate on Orbán’s “conservative revolution,” ignited by the Hungarian dissident appeal, in which different liberal and critical media – including Kultura Liberalna, along with the Czech Denik Referendum and the Slovak Je to tak. In our next post, we will publish an expanded version of his text prepared for Deliberately Considered.

There is bad news coming from Central Europe. But the persistence of critique provides hope. It is good to know that critical Hungarians, along with their neighbors are paying close attention. So should we.