Wednesday, August 16, 2017



Meanwhile, in Poland

While we're all worrying about Nazis in America, we might also want to keep an eye on Poland:

Polish police broke up a feminist rally and forcefully removed activists to clear the way for a march for far-right extremists.

A live stream of the protest shows members of the All-Polish Women's Strike group and activists from Obywatele RP, which aims to defend democratic principles in Poland, taking part in a sit-in in central Warsaw, to block the far-right rally's route.

Many of the women were holding up photos of Heather Heyer, the American woman killed when a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-protesters during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.


According to the story, the far-right groups included the National Radical Camp and the All-Polish Youth, explicitly racist, homophobic and anti-democratic groups (and in the NRC's case, fascist). Poland's politics has had an unpleasant nationalist and theocratic tinge for some time now, and recently the government has moved strongly towards autocracy, banning anti-government protests and attempting to end judicial independence. And now, their police are explicitly siding with fascists. Its a scary sign of how quickly democracy can die if you let people like the Law and Justice Party take over...