Democracies
/ 2009:Jun
/ Essay
When in Israel, I watched videos on YouTube from anarchists’
[Anarchists Against the Wall] protests against the occupation. Later,
I joined one of those protests in Bil’in. We were shot at with
rubber bullets and attacked by tear gas. Holes for new bodies had
already been dug up at the cemetery; not that anything bad was to
happen to us, but these holes in the ground made an impression on
you. I shot some footage then that I later managed to edit into a
relatively sensible narrative. It actually looks similar to the
anarchists’ films. Sometime later, in Belfast, I attended a
loyalist demonstration of people who want Northern Ireland to remain
a British dependency, or, in fact, for the British occupation to
continue. When I talked to people in Liverpool, asking them whether
they felt like occupiers, and they couldn’t understand what
occupation I was talking about. I attended the 60th anniversary of
the Nakba, the Palestinian tragedy. I arrived late for the 60th
anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel. I regretted that
because there was a major military parade with fighter jets flying
over the beach in Tel Aviv. I saw them later when they flew to bomb
the Gaza Strip in January 2009. The national airport in northern Tel
Aviv is also a military airfield. I took part in anti-war
demonstrations that prevented nothing, and after the bodies had been
counted, we went on a silent march to Jaffa. People simply lit
candles on the streets, feeling helpless towards their own government
and the militant majority. That Sunday when the bishops’ letter
about in vitro fertilisation was read out in churches throughout
Poland, I went to attend the evening mass at the St. Stanislaw Kostka
church in Warsaw. It was a ‘patriotic mass’, and Christmas Eve
was not far away. The priest celebrated the mass and read out
excerpts from the Polish Episcopate’s letter. Then he added his
commentary. As usual, no one discussed him; no one spoke except the
priest and the altar boys. No one interrupted the priest’s
homophobic, narrow-minded rant. I was silent too. Apparently, all the
conformism training I had received in religion and patriotism classes
was not for nothing. When attending a military parade on the Polish
Army Day, I went, like everyone else, to see the festivities in the
Łazienki park. Under a Chopin monument we listened to a military
band play Niemen’s ‚It’s a Strange World‘, where man still
despises another man.
Together with other ordinary people I had the opportunity to
participate in various demonstrations and protest marches,
experiencing, alongside others, my participation in the ‘critical
mass’ of democracy – whether that democracy was real or feigned,
functioning in a free country, a semi-free one or an occupied one.
Each of those events was made to my measure and seemed the ultimate
horizon of my political participation – to march, chanting slogans,
or to stand behind a fence separating us from the VIP sector. For
only the VIPs are granted the honour and ecstasy of full
participation in the political pornography of getting close to the
eye of the events.
