Lefteast
Only one day after the Polish National Electoral Commission announced the incumbent president Andrzej Duda as the winner of the close runoff elections, a queer activist was arrested in Warsaw. According to witnesses, Margot’s arrest looked more like a kidnapping because ununiformed police officers handcuffed her with the use of force and dragged her out of her friend’s flat. (…) Queers have become public enemy number one in Poland.
It is no surprise that this region was one of the first to discuss travel corridors in otherwise unstable global conditions. Unthinkable in this moment is the notion of solidarity and resource-sharing. In short, there are multiple realities we have to reckon with: one is that these countries who are pioneering certain politics of exclusion and normalcy are loaded with emergency health infrastructure; and the second, is the fact that there are other countries who have been inflicted with the unfortunate scenario of high infection rates and extremely low emergency infrastructures.
Hungary’s new law “seems to be part of the broader war of the government on gender. Defining sex at birth as an unchangeable characteristic is part of that discourse and is an obvious attack on the right of trans and intersex people in Hungary. The situation for trans people was getting worse in the past years but we did not experienced targeted attacks before this law proposal.”
Interview excerpt: “For us, in our part of the world, one of the most breathtaking aspects of the history of the Haitian Revolution is that the Polish battalion sent there by the French switched sides and supported the uprising. Mind you, some of the Polish survivors ended up settling there, and there are even today proud Haitians who claim, partly, Polish family heritage.
There are many intricacies to this story. My point is that, in the late-18th, early-19th century, it was still possible for east European subjects to experience a political, moral and emotional identification with Black people and the objectives of the latters’ armed struggles against colonial rule and slavery. This, by the way, was not unique to Poles—there is ample evidence of similar positions in Hungarian history as well.
By today, this political, moral and emotional identification has become almost impossible.”
The Sutjeska and Bijeljina monuments appear to stand for two profoundly divergent worlds, one symbolizing the cosmopolitan and antifascist past of socialist Yugoslavia, the other embodying the hyper-nationalist and segregationist present of post-Yugoslav states. Yet both monuments were made by the same sculptor. As I walked away, my stomach still churning, my first thought was not “How could this be?”, but “Oh no, not again.”
That is an alternative political project worth thinking about: how to replace security with solidarity? In this light, I am profoundly against using the word ‘security’ in progressive political activism. To claim that the security of the subaltern is important, too, is to be blind to the fact that the powerful and propertied can never take that claim seriously in a system built on the primacy of property and of capital.
Note from LeftEast editors: This article originally appeared in Dversia on 07.10.2020. “Tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons against bare-handed youth! Dad, this is for you who died and there was no respirator! (..) This is for you and for my newborn son! There were no respirators in the Zemun hospital while they (the National […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The recent rise of far-right populisms and the general mood of crisis has triggered reflections among those who’ve experienced the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s on the lessons to be learnt from that conflict. The Disorder of Things blog is featuring a series of ‘Yugosplaining’ interventions, in which activists, artists, and […]
Note from LeftEast editors: We post this article in cooperation with Counterfire. Despite left gains, early elections paid off for the ruling centre-right party, writes Vladimir Unkovski-Korica On Sunday 5 July, Croatia held early parliamentary elections. Turnout was only 46 percent, reflecting low levels of engagement with official politics. Despite this, the ruling conservative party […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This talk was recorded at the workshop on After US Hegemony: Geopolitical Economy in the 21st Century, held at the Karl Polányi Center for Global Social Analysis at Corvinus University, Budapest, on February 11, 2020.