Saturday 12 November 2011

Anti-fascist actions


On November 11, ZSP in Warsaw took part in the antifascist blockade of a right-wing march. As always, we showed our opposition to the ideology of nationalism and patriotism as well as fascism and spread our texts which were also anti-capitalist and internationalist.

Many incidents took place and there were some attacks made by aggressive nationalists. The nationalists however were not alone in their march, gathering a lot of support from the right, who united with them. The support of the nationalist march became stronger due to the opposition against the liberals who dominated the mobilization.  The liberal establishment seemed to enact their rage more even than the antifascists who have been fighting them for years.


The police harassed and arrested many people, but the worse of their violence was directed against the right-wing action. Water cannons were used, tear gas, which affected many people in the area. The police beat people who were just standing, hitting them in the crouch and even kicking them in the face and bringing the LRAD and other weapons that they shouldn't even have.

Again this year we did not go into the 11th of November coalition for various reasons, but we acted. We also spent the night defending our comrade's home against possible nazi attacks with many others.

Some concern was caused by the arrest of a large number of antifa from Germany – 92 people. The people ran into some trouble with fascists and decided, for whatever reason, to run into the liberal bar called Nowy Wspanialy Swiat (which we were picketing last month). As we described, some people related to this place tried to use the police against us and in the past made strong criticism against antifascists. Instead of a confrontational event, they organized something called „colorful independence” this year, focusing on getting celebrity endorsements and having hierarchical events where they figured as stars. They tried at several occasions to prevent other groups from speaking about other issues during the events, even trying to censor a talk about social exclusion. As we understand, the antifa ran into this place but later were forced out by the people at the bar and were arrested by the police. Only 5 of them managed to avoid this and we heard about this from one of them, although she doesn't know Polish and therefore cannot tell us exactly what was said or done. Whatever the situation was, we suppose that they were not very happy to have street fighting antifa in their establishment and we hope that nobody from abroad will make such a mistake again. As of writing, the arrested are still detained and we have information that a few people might have charges against them.

Below are some links to videos showing what it looked like in Warsaw yesterday.