PEOPLE DIE A Manifest of the action on Freedom Mast and an appeal to people of Poland

I am writing this text before my action. I don’t know yet if it will succeed, how high will I be able to climb and if I succeed in hanging the flag. I also don’t know the extent of repressions facing me back on the ground, but I suspect that for at least few hours I won’t have an occasion to tell you, what I was trying to convey. That is why now, before anything happens, I will explain why am I going to attempt hanging the refugee flag on the freedom mast.
People die on Polish border. To be precise, they don’t just die – they are being killed. If someone would survive if they would receive help, and that help is intentionally withheld from them – that is murder. And what polish state does goes further than malicious inaction. Those people, searching for help, fleeing repression and hoping to find here some safety and the freedom so supposedly beloved by Poles, are captured by us and forcibly expelled into the bog and wilderness, back into the grip of cold and moisture, back under the boot of a Belarusian solider… What we do is no different from shooting those people, those women and children, those unarmed civilians, it just doesn’t look so drastic on television. You can’t see blood… but we are spilling it. At the time I am writing this, since that situation began, 18 people has fallen victim to our border policy, has fallen victim to the polish state. Of course that’s only a number based on official communicates and verified sources, the true number of bodies still lying in the forest, bodies floating downstream in the river, bodies discreetly dragged to Belarusian side, remains unknown. And if our state will stay on its chosen course, that number will grow as the winter approaches.
But, in the situation when Poland kills innocent people -many Poles don’t know anything about it. In the situation when we passed laws legalizing push-backs, that on Polish-Belarusian border often are a death sentence, a sentence that’s executed slowly, by refusing people their humanity – many Poles are not interested. In the situation when human rights and international conventions are broken in broad daylight – many Poles don’t want to think about it. It’s not their business what the government does over there. It’s not like they are the ones stranding kids and pregnant women in the forest. It’s only the state apparatus representing them, and forces founded by their taxes… But this apathy, this averting of eyes, won’t protect us from culpability. That’s why I am climbing the highest flag mast in this country – that situation has to be forced in front of people’s eyes, no matter how much they want to avoid it. Quoting Marek Edelman  - “Because at some point passiveness is the same as killing, as murder. If you see evil and turn your head, or you don’t help when you could help, you are becoming co-culpable.” And what is now happening is that point. That point at which we have to put up resistance, when we have to act, and act in more substantial way than by posting on facebook.
Maybe some will be scandalized by the use of the Edelman quote – After all he was writing about nazism, about Holocaust, we should not use lightly references to one of biggest nightmares in history! This is how I respond to that – I am using that quote very consciously. Yes, the Holocaust was an event on different, incomparable scale, but it didn’t come from nowhere. Before the death camps there were pogroms, there were deportation campaigns, and at the root of it there was propaganda, a media blitz of hate… And that sounds worryingly familiar. What really scares me today is, how many voices you can hear in this country not only denying the nightmare happening to refugees at the border, but often in fact openly approving of it, expressing that people dying at the border deserve their fate, celebrating the “defense of Polish border” and suggesting even further escalation of violence. It has to be said openly. When priority over person’s life takes what they have in their papers, which side of the line on a map they are, their religion or skin color – we are facing nationalism, racism, xenophobia…What we observe currently in Poland is progressing quiet acceptance of fascist ideas by a big part of society. Those voices slowly stop coming from the fringes of political discourse – they are increasingly picked up by the mainstream, by the politicians of the ruling party… This year’s so called “independence march”, an event organized by ultra-nationalist groups, during which the speeches talked about shooting emigrants and delegalizing emigration entirely, became an official state event. The prime minister of this country organized press conference he used to demonize refugees as a threat to the country, using images from bestiality pornography, thus referencing most disgusting myths about people of middle east. That kind of a witch-hunt, bringing to mind practiced by anti-Semites accusing Jews of adding children’s blood to matzah bread, just as that libel will lead to deadly violence, the air in this country starts to smell of pogrom. The spontaneous violence inspired by this rhetoric already started – the assault on group of refugees wounding them with crowbar, the destruction of cars belonging to Medics at the Border, group rendering aid to suffering refuges, the defacing of the graves of Stuhr family, in retribution for humanitarian activism of the popular actor. It’s getting more and more fashy, and while it’s catalyzed by the matter of refuges, the problem involves us all. Even if all the humanitarian appeals didn’t get to you and you are not inclined to empathy towards people in no relation to you, stopping that process should be a matter of self-preservice. Many will recall the Niemöller’s poem about how they came for some, then for the other, and he stayed silent until they came for him. When we take that first step, when we decide that humanity of person is up for debate, that human rights can be ignored in some situations – the first domino piece will fall, and sooner or later it will be you or someone close to you who’s right to live will be debated…
We also need to realize that our future involves massive emigration. What’s happening now is only a mild prelude to great moves of populace that climate changes will bring about in not so far off future… The energy policy of our country, among others, keeps us on course for certain disaster, during which the global south will largely become uninhabitable, and all those people will have to move somewhere. Even the most optimistic scenarios of combating the climate disaster include big number of people having to leave their home and search for a new place. Because of that it is high time to start becoming accustomed to the thought that our world will become bigger, that new elements, new to us cultures, new neighbors will appear in it. It is not the end of the world, but it is in human nature to fear the unknown, and there will be those who will want to feed this fear, control us with it, build their power on it… That’s why I am appealing to you: Let’s walk towards that what is unknown, and let’s get rid of fear by getting to know it. Integration and building shared communities is also a form of resistance, oftentimes hard one, but effective!
There is room for more than one flag on the mast.

With regards, Treeclimber Paweł