The Guardian
 |
| Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science is illuminated in union flag colours the day before the referendum |
Poles on Brexit: 'I don't think many will stay. Life in Britain is tough'
Polish people in Britain and back home tell of uncertainty amid reports of xenophobia and UK’s refusal to offer any guarantees
Julian Borger in Warsaw
Friday 22 July 2016 11.00 BST Last modified on Friday 22 July 2016 20.22 BST
Marcin Skierniewski has lived in London for four years, working as a builder to save enough to put some money down on a flat. That is no easy thing in the capital, but his goal was at least on the horizon when he took a holiday in Poland, with Britain yet to vote on its EU membership. While he was away, his adoptive home turned itself inside out.Waiting at at Warsaw airport, he was preparing to return to Britain, uncertain what exactly that would entail. It was not the reports of anti-Polish xenophobia that unsettled him. “I’m absolutely not worried,” he said. “I have plenty of British friends who will stand by me. I’m not afraid.”
It was the cloud of doubt around his life plans that fuelled his anxiety. “I’m worried how it might affect me. I don’t know what happens about my idea of getting a flat now,” said Skierniewski.
The uncertainty is understandable and deliberately created: the British government is refusing to guarantee the full residency rights of EU nationals who have established lives in the UK without a reciprocal deal for Britons living in other EU countries.
Uncertainty will continue to dog the UK’s nearly 3 million European residents for some time to come. More than 850,000 of those total are Polish, but many are reconsidering their options and not just because of Brexit uncertainty and the impact on the value of earning in pounds.
Paulina, who requested her surname not be used, works at an art gallery in London. She said she thought the threat of xenophobic attacks had been exaggerated in the press. But she thought Britain’s Polish population would begin to shrink.
“Many of them are going to go back anyway,” she said. “The Polish government has introduced a £100 child benefit scheme regardless of earnings to get people to stay ... And life in Britain is tough. There is overpopulation. Train tickets are really expensive which makes it all much harder. Social mobility is not great. State education is not great. I don’t think a lot of people will stay. They might decide to go elsewhere.”
The far-reaching implications of the UK vote do not just affect ordinary Europeans who happen to have made a home in Britain.
A group of old school friends, all aged 32, were out for a drink in Warsaw’s Poznańska street, under the tall silhouette of the city’s defining monument, the communist-era Palace of Culture and Science. Their first reaction on being asked about Brexit was to shrug it off as someone else’s problem, but on second thoughts it disturbed them.
Krzysztof Paciorkowski, a vegetable trader, had seen the stories about anti-Polish incidents. “The Brits don’t like us much it seems, which makes no sense. Poles work hard, they work professionally and pay taxes,” he said. “I also think it was pretty strange when the Brits started asking Google what the EU is, the day after they voted in the referendum.”
Paweł Kurach, an apple farmer with orchards 25 miles (40km) outside Warsaw, had two concerns. His brother’s family had been in London for 10 years –he was worried about their future and what would happen regarding his brother’s longstanding job as a restaurant manager. The second worry was contagion.
“What I worry about is whether Poland is going to be next,” Kurach said. “I worry it’s going to be like dominoes and the question is, where does it end?”
Poland’s rightwing nationalists are already in power in Warsaw. The Law and Justice party (PiS) has drawn expressions of concern from Brussels and Washington over the independence of the country’s constitutional court. It has purged the state media of leftwingers and centrists, and has overseen the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Many of the comments underneath recent online reports of anti-Polish incidents in the UK, observed that it was no more or less than what was happening in Poland.
The prime minister, Beata Szydło, seized on the UK’s vote to leave as a symptom of Europe’s ills, and argued it justified a new European treaty that would repatriate powers from Brussels and therefore be more responsive to ordinary people.
“Poland is active and wants to be active in the process of change which must come to the European Union, because Brexit shows first and foremost that Europeans no longer want a union of its form up to now,” Szydło said.
The centrist and pro-European opposition has argued that British withdrawal increased the need for greater European solidarity and integration. Bogdan Klich, a former defence minister and now a leading opposition senator, said: “The UK vote will mean a visible shadow on Polish-British relations though it will not happen immediately but over a long period.
“We are concerned in such a context about the future of the European Union. We are aware the EU will not play such an influential role on the international stage as it played before.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/22/i-wasnt-afraid-i-took-a-stand-in-baton-rouge-because-enough-is-enough
The Guardian
Opinion
I wasn't afraid. I took a stand in Baton Rouge because enough is enough
Ieshia Evans
Friday 22 July 2016 18.17 BST Last modified on Monday 25 July 2016 19.02 BST
It was 1am in Queens, New York. I was 18 years old. My roommate and I just wanted to buy some juice on our journey home from working night shifts in Manhattan. But as we came up to the busy corner store, a white police officer stopped me. He searched me and asked for my identification. I didn’t understand why.
“I just need to make sure that you’re not a prostitute,” he said, projecting his voice so that all the customers in the store could hear. Their jaws dropped. I was so embarrassed. We went home without the juice.
Would this have happened if I were a white woman? I don’t think so. I wasn’t dressed in a provocative way. You have the right to wear whatever the heck you want – in New York, it’s legal for women to go shirtless – but still: I was wearing a knee-length skirt and a dark blazer. I wasn’t hanging on a corner. My head was not stuck inside a guy’s car.
I had been blinded to the fact that this, and so much worse, was going on in America. That racism, whether subtle or blunt, is systemic.
It is in our neighborhoods, which are structured for the failure of our people. Here is your liquor store; here is your church; here are your overcrowded schools with books stuck together with scotch tape. And very little else.
It is in our media, where the light-skinned black woman with the green eyes and softer-textured hair is the one all over the billboards. Where there is uproar over a black man, his white wife and their interracial child featuring in a simple Cheerios commercial.
And it is in the abuse of power, not just by police officers but the entire judicial system, against black people. Abuse that culminates in the deadly shootings of men like Alton Sterling, whose killing in Baton Rouge drew me to Louisiana earlier this month.
When Ferguson, Baltimore and other protests broke out, I would make selfish excuses. I couldn’t travel. I had to work in my job as a nurse, because I had to pay the bills. I remember the guilt of feeling that I should be there.
This time, enough was enough. I had to do something.
Too many people are being slaughtered by those who are employed to serve and protect us. It is becoming the norm. Our government is not doing anything for us. So we’re going to have to do something for ourselves. Baton Rouge was enlightening. It opened my eyes. I had been sleeping for years. I have been sleeping and now I’m awake.
When the armored officers rushed at me, I had no fear. I wasn’t afraid. I was just wondering: “How do these people sleep at night?” Then they put me in a van and drove me away. Only hours later did someone explain that I was arrested for obstructing a highway.
They took our possessions and fingerprinted us. Then they stuck four of us women in a room together and had four officers strip-search us. We were all ordered to take off everything, to bend over, and to cough. There was no privacy, no dignity. We were treated as if we were murderers or child molesters. It was degrading. It angered me. These were black female officers, and they were treating us as if we were criminals.
People call us African Americans. But really we are Africans living in America. How can we call ourselves Americans when what is supposed to be our national constitution did not recognise us as human beings? We were not people – we were property. And despite the amendments, things have not really changed.
White Americans told Africans: “We’re going to kidnap you, we’re going to strip away your identity, then slowly give you back the rights you had from birth, and make you feel like they’re something special. We’re going to keep you stupid by making it illegal for you to read, or write, or go to school. So all you’ll know will be the lies we are force-feeding you.” We were force-fed another culture, another religion, other rituals, another language.
Barack Obama being elected president eight years ago was overwhelming. It was my first time voting. “We actually matter now,” I thought. But it was just a setup. And when that reality hits you, it’s harsh.
It is like being a child on a farm. You have this baby piglet and think it is an amazing thing. Then you have a couple of years with it, and grow to love it. And then finally it hits you that this pig is only on this farm to be slaughtered and harvested for its resources.
When you really think about it, what has Obama done for black people? What laws or rules has he passed for us? When the police kill someone, his first instinct is to try to pacify us. To talk about how we shouldn’t riot, that we should keep the peace, and that it’s a tragedy. Yes, it’s a tragedy, so what are you going to do about it? He’s done so much more for the LGBT community than he has for the Africans living in America.
Obama chose politics over his people, and it’s sad. He has let us down. Where is his uproar? Why isn’t he marching? Why isn’t he protesting? Doesn’t he feel strongly enough about the future of his daughters? Sandra Bland: that could have been one of his children.
I have a six-year-old son, Justin, and I fear more for his life than I do for my own. How should I raise him? To be afraid? To keep his head down and not get in trouble, to not look the police in the eye because they might mess with him? Or do I raise him in strength, to embrace his color, to know his rights and to know that he’s not breaking the law or doing anything unjust, that he’s going to be fine, and that no one should take away any of his civil liberties? Parents have a responsibility to wake the hell up and realize what’s going on.
The presidential election campaign has been disgusting. I won’t be voting; I refuse. It is in Donald Trump that the true colors of much of America are coming out. They hid behind all these veils, inside all these closets, for so long. And now the racism is right there.
And I don’t care what Hillary Clinton does to try to prove that she’s for black people. We are not going to forget it was her husband, blindly supported by a lot of black people, who put in place the system that has taken so many black men from their families and put them in prison for carrying the same weed that states are now legalizing.
Now she wants to disassociate and say, “Well, that was my husband.” Yes, well: you were there in the background, cheering him on.
Justin hasn’t seen the picture of me in Baton Rouge. Explaining what happened was difficult. I told him that Mommy got arrested and he said: “Why? I thought only bad people get arrested?”
I was stumped for a little bit. And then I just said: “You know what? That’s not always the case.”
The Guardian
Photography
Jonathan Jones and Nell Frizzell
Tuesday 12 July 2016 16.28 BST
The Baton Rouge protester: 'a Botticelli nymph attacked by Star Wars baddies'
The photograph of Iesha Evans at a Black Lives Matter protest has become an instant classic. Art critic Jonathan Jones assesses the image’s impact, while photographer Jonathan Bachman recalls how he captured the shot
A great photograph is a moment liberated from time. If we could see what happened before and after this beautiful stillness and hear the cacophony of yells and arguments that must have filled reality’s soundtrack at a protest in Baton Rouge against the taking of black lives, the heroic stand of Iesha L Evans would just be a fragile glimpse of passing courage. It might even be entirely lost in the rush of images and noise. Instead, Reuters photographer Jonathan Bachman was able to preserve a simple human act of quiet bravery and give it an almost religious power.
It is not just that time has frozen but that, in stopping its stream, the camera has revealed a near-supernatural radiance protecting Evans, as if her goodness were a force field. The heavily armoured police officers inevitably look slightly inhuman. They may have good reason to wear such all-covering protective suits and helmets, so soon after a sniper killed five officers who were policing a protest in Dallas but, in their hi-tech riot gear, they unfortunately resemble futuristic insectoid robots, at once prosthetically dehumanised and squatly, massively, menacingly masculine.
Evans, by contrast, shows her calm, composed face and bold, straight body, protected by nothing more than a dress fluttering in the summer breeze. She is a Botticelli nymph attacked by Star Wars baddies. And yet they seem to stop, to yield, held back by something that radiates from her inner composure, her possession of the truth. In the instant that Bachman has caught for ever, the two officers appear confused, paralysed, even defeated by her decorous protest. Their bodies arch backwards, away from her, recoiling in recognition of her power. The officer nearest to the camera looks truly nonplussed, out of his depth, his meaty white hands flailing.
People have compared this confrontation between massed forces of authority and a single protester with the famous image of a man facing a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or the 1967 photograph of a “flower child” in front of a row of armed soldiers at the Pentagon. Yet the power of this particular image is stranger than that. It summons up supernatural forces. The goodness of Iesha Evans is radiant and that radiance can stop the police in their tracks. Her ramrod immobility not only expresses moral strength but literally gives her a superpower. (Evans’s only comment about the picture, in a Facebook post, was: “I appreciate the well wishes and love, but this is the work of God. I am a vessel!”)
A moment stilled from days of rage creates a stillness, a silence, into which we pour our belief in the human spirit. The violence cutting through the US gives way, mercifully, to an image of nonviolent heroism that recalls the righteous, from Martin Luther King to Rosa Parks. Yet is this picture popular because it expresses the truth, or because it softens it?
This image is beautiful, yet it evades the harsh facts that are tearing America apart. To put it bluntly, it is not young women in floaty dresses who are being killed in cold blood on video by police officers. It is white America’s fear of young black men that is truly at issue here – and this picture allows us to forget that. Alton Sterling was shot dead in Baton Rouge when arresting officers already had him on the ground. That and the killing of Philando Castile are just the latest in a series of depressingly similar cases in which there seems to be overwhelming evidence that young black men are considered fair game for any trigger-happy law enforcement officer or security guard. In turn, 25-year-old Micah Johnson shot dead five police officers in a cycle of violence that has to make us ask if racism is incurably rooted in America’s stained history, if black lives matter at all to white America.
No wonder we turn to this picture for a kind of healing, a twinkling of optimism. This is an image that evokes the heroic days of the civil rights movement: a hopeful moment seized from a storm of horrors. Yet it may be a beautiful illusion, whose gentle strength will break as soon as the next gun is fired.
A group of people had come to demonstrate in front of the Baton Rouge police headquarters. They were blocking one of the lanes of traffic on the Airline Highway. That prompted this big mix of Louisiana law enforcement officers and sheriffs from surrounding parishes, as well as the Baton Rouge police department, to come out to try to clear the road.
They had successfully cleared the demonstrators off to the side, but there were some people who weren’t willing to move. So I started photographing that confrontation. I heard someone over my shoulder say: “Wow – she’s going to get arrested.” I turned around and saw this woman just standing there. I knew straight away what was happening; they were arresting her and she was making her stand.
I just got into position and was able to snap the shot. I thought it was important – the woman in the dress is posing no threat and these two male officers are coming to detain her. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t resist arrest, and the officers didn’t throw her to the ground or drag her off. It was very peaceful. I feel the photo is very representative of the peacefulness of the protests that have taken place in Baton Rouge over the past week.
As I took the image, I wasn’t thinking of any other pictures [such as Flower Power by Bernie Boston’s Vietnam protest shot or Stuart Franklin’s photo of “tank man” at Tiananmen Square]. I hardly had any time to reflect at all; as soon as I took the photo, I had to go back to my car in a parking lot to file it, using a hotspot from my phone.
From what I saw earlier in the week – people chanting “No justice, no peace” and “Hands up, don’t shoot” – this is as tense as the situation got in Baton Rouge; there was a lot going on and I was just trying to get into a good spot to document it. I shoot a lot of sports, and speed is key. You have got to keep an open eye – these things happen so quickly. There are tricks, of course, such as looking in your LCD screen to catch reflections off that. Also, Reuters sent me on a hostile-environment training course a couple of months ago and I found that incredibly useful.
I actually filed another photo first, of a woman confronting the police with her arm raised. This one followed about 30 seconds later. I got back from Baton Rouge to 54 emails and 77 text messages. But the real hero of this story is that woman; she deserves all the praise. It was super brave to just stand there and make her stand; I was just off to the side, taking a picture.
As told to Nell Frizzell
On this day in 1942 the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto begins.
Fact, forgery and the inciting of pogroms
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The forgery was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world's economies.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the US in the 1920s. Adolf Hitler was a major proponent. It was studied, as if factual, in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power in 1933,[1] despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document.
The Protocols is a fabricated document purporting to be factual. Textual evidence shows that it could not have been produced prior to 1901.[citation needed] It is notable that the title of Sergei Nilus's widely distributed edition contains the dates "1902–1903", and it is likely that the document was actually written at this time in Russia, despite Nilus' attempt to cover this up by inserting French-sounding words into his edition.[2] Cesare G. De Michelis argues that it was manufactured in the months after a Russian Zionist congress in September 1902, and that it was originally a parody of Jewish idealism meant for internal circulation among antisemites until it was decided to clean it up and publish it as if it were real. Self-contradictions in various testimonies show that the individuals involved—including the text's initial publisher, Pavel Krushevan—purposefully obscured the origins of the text and lied about it in the decades afterwards.[3]
If the placement of the forgery in 1902–1903 Russia is correct, then it was written at the beginning of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, in which thousands of Jews died or fled the country. Many of the people whom De Michelis suspects of involvement in the forgery were directly responsible for inciting the pogroms.
Source material for the forgery consisted jointly of Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly;[4] and a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche, which had been translated into Russian in 1872.[5]
A major source for the Protocols was Der Judenstaat by Theodor Herzl, which was referred to as Zionist Protocols in its initial French and Russian editions. Paradoxically, early Russian editions of the Protocols assert that they did not come from a Zionist organization.[6] The text, which nowhere advocates for Zionism, resembles a parody of Herzl's ideas.[7]
The Protocols is one of the best-known and most-discussed examples of literary forgery, with analysis and proof of its fraudulent origin going as far back as 1921.[8] The forgery is an early example of "conspiracy theory" literature.[9] Written mainly in the first person plural,[a] the text includes generalizations, truisms, and platitudes on how to take over the world: take control of the media and the financial institutions, change the traditional social order, etc. It does not contain specifics.[10]
- Segel, BW and Levy, RS. A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. University of Nebraska Press (1995), p. 30. ISBN 0803242433
- Michelis, Cesare G. De (2004). The non-existent manuscript : a study of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. p. 65. ISBN 0803217277.
- Michelis, Cesare G. De (2004). The non-existent manuscript : a study of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. pp. 76–80. ISBN 0803217277.
- Jacobs, Steven Leonard; Weitzman, Mark (2003), Dismantling the Big Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ISBN 0-88125-785-0.p.15
- Segel, Binjamin W (1996) [1926], Levy, Richard S, ed., A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, University of Nebraska Press, p. 97, ISBN 0-8032-9245-7.
- Michelis, Cesare G. De (2004). The non-existent manuscript : a study of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press., p. 47.
- Michelis, Cesare G. De (2004). The non-existent manuscript : a study of the Protocols of the sages of Zion. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press., p. 114]
- A Hoax of Hate, Jewish Virtual Library.
- Boym, Svetlana (1999), "Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and 'The Protocols of Zion'", Comparative Literature 51 (Spring): 97, doi:10.2307/1771244.
- Pipes, Daniel (1997), Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, The Free Press, Simon & Schuster,
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