Not red,
not rainbow,
only a national Poland.
Over the past ten years,
politics across the world has been transformed by
a new brand of vicious right-wing populism.
This has played out with particularly brutal consequences in Poland,
where the ruling Law and Justice Party
is accused of restricting women’s rights,
targeting the LGBTQ community,
and empowering violent far-right nationalist groups.
We will turn them into dust
and destroy this revolution.
National pride!
[Decade of Hate]
My name’s Tim Hume,
and I cover the far right in Europe for VICE World News.
That’s taken me to Poland,
where I’ve seen firsthand how its populist government
has scapegoated minorities and emboldened the far right.
For many years, Poland has had some of
the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
But in October 2020,
the government announced plans to tighten them even further
with an almost complete ban.
Protecting the right to life of an unborn child
[despite] its state of health.
When women took the streets to protest this attack on their rights,
they were physically assaulted
and verbally abused by far-right ultranationalist thugs.
You might have expected the police at these marches
to protect the women,
but in fact, the cops just seem to stand by.
Meanwhile, the politicians in power
actively backed those confronting the protesters.
When you have two values,
the right to life and freedom of the woman,
the right to life is more important.
I’ve had an abortion
and I don’t give a f**k what you think about it.
Thank you.
Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński
called on Catholics to protect churches from demonstrations.
We need to protect Polish churches.
At any cost.
One of his MPs praised the nationalist groups
for defending civilization from women he branded “barbarians.”
We know that many bad things happened during those protests.
People were beaten. People were arrested.
It was really aggressive,
and it was a lot of harassment in this.
And they were, to a certain extent, acting hand-in-hand with the police.
And this moment, when the leader of the country
is sharing the monopoly for violence
with private organizations like far right,
it’s extremely dangerous to the democracy.
Those guilty of bloodshed
might attack the churches again.
I call upon you, if you have God in your heart,
to come to Warsaw to protect these places [churches].
When you see police have those shields and you know they have gas,
you feel like you are in the war with your own government.
So...
it can be scary.
And it’s not just women.
At Pride marches, the LGBTQ community
has been subject to a similar wave of brutal far-right violence.
There was this Pride march in Bialystok.
People got attacked.
People got chased on the streets.
People got beaten up.
People got bricks thrown at them or bottles with piss,
not mentioning the heckles.
And there was lots and lots of police.
There was chaos.
People were running around, and they were scared.
And many, many of my friends are still traumatized after this event.
The ruling party and the groups that hang out with them
have waged a war against the LGBT+ community.
The government and the church are working together
to embolden the far right.
In recent years, this has become an all too common sight:
far-right ultranationalists,
many of them drawn from the violent football hooligan scene,
clashing again and again
with protesters standing up for progressive causes.
It’s a direct consequence of Law and Justice’s divisive approach
since coming to power in 2015,
with a goal to aggressively reshape Poland
in line with its narrow, traditionalist vision.
Since then, the party has scapegoated minorities,
polarized society,
and emboldened the far right to act as willing muscle
in its destructive culture war.
Gay parades, LGBT marches are a provocation.
One of the clearest illustrations of
the growing confidence of Polish nationalist groups
is the Independence March in Warsaw,
which regularly draws radicals from across Poland...
and elsewhere in Europe.
A Pole, a Hungarian, two nephews.
In 2020, marchers clashed with police...
and hurled flares at an apartment building that had Women’s Strike
and LGBTQ banners hanging from it, starting a fire.
In previous years, the violent hooligan elements of these marches
would regularly clash with police.
However, around 2016, something seemed to shift.
The change of government meant
that there were no attacks on the Independence March.
We are happy with the new government
-and with the president. -We are finally in a free country.
Though far-right activists and police have continued to clash at marches,
there’s a sense among some nationalists
that the government shares many of their values.
At the 2018 march, the president, Andrzej Duda,
even spoke at a joint event the government organized
alongside nationalist groups...
Let’s go together.
Let this be our joint march. Let it be a march for everyone.
as fascists carried banners with hateful messaging.
Death to the enemies of our homeland.
It's a little bit like playing with fire.
You cannot just say, you know, one day to the far right that,
“OK, now you are good,”
and the next day, you will charge them.
When you are saying one day that you are going together with them,
then it means you are giving them some positions
in the whole structure of the state.
Unfortunately, this seems to be totally in line with
Law and Justice’s strategy
of whipping up hatred against marginalized groups
and painting them as threats
to Poland’s traditional Catholic identity.
The LGBT community is a good scapegoat for the government
because you can present them as a threat to
the traditional notion of family
and to your approach towards Christianity.
People are struggling with the quality of life.
It’s easy to tell them that they have one enemy,
and they can look at this enemy and say, “OK, it’s not my fault,
it’s their fault.
It’s the fault of someone who’s not even entirely Polish,”
because the LGBT+ community is shown by the politicians
and by the public media right now
as this threat coming from somewhere outside,
as this foreign group that’s never been Polish in its core.
This political alliance with the Catholic Church
is at the root of the campaign against LGBTQ,
as well as the increased restrictions on women’s rights.
About a third of the country has declared itself an LGBT-free zone.
These are anti-LGBT, LGBT-free zone stickers, in fact,
that this newspaper in Poland printed so users could display them.
Meanwhile, a bill potentially criminalizing
anyone providing sex education
is still pending.
Restriction of women’s rights
is paying political debts to the Catholic Church.
So if the Catholic Church is supporting the ruling party,
then the ruling party must give something in exchange.
When the Catholic Church has a strong stance on abortion,
then their coin is restriction of access to abortion.
They don’t respect our lives, our decisions, and us like people.
Experts say Law and Justice has moved the needle
on the bounds of acceptable speech,
making the previously unsayable sayable
and helping to mainstream hateful rhetoric.
Abortion pills are the business of death.
This has divided the country,
but it seems to have worked for them politically.
In the most recent parliamentary elections,
Law and Justice increased its already massive vote share,
as did a party on the extreme right.
Women earn less because they are
smaller, weaker, and less intelligent than men.
On average, of course.
In fact, as Law and Justice has embraced more radical positions,
its politics have often become difficult to distinguish
from the far-right fringe.
It’s even absorbed politicians from the ultranationalist movement.
One of them has compared gay marriage to bestiality.
He's now deputy minister of education.
This is the guy who decides what goes in Polish school books.
LGBT+ youth are growing up surrounded by this whole agenda,
this whole ideology that says
that there is something innately wrong with them.
The culture war has left Poland’s minorities under siege,
but Polish activists are not backing down
in what they see as a battle for their country’s soul.
And when you know that there are people who are arrested,
and you know that you are fighting about your freedom,
that makes you feel like you do very important things
because the right to decide is your right to be a free person.
This is my place, and this is my home,
and even though Poland hates me,
I really love this country.