It is impossible to compose about it, it is impossible to compose about it – so it is difficult, let us confuse about the planet that will appear from this war, although we do not really know who will win it yet.
The spontaneous desire to aid refugees in Polish society will change the face of this land for a long time. This is the first specified bottom-up teardrop from the carnival of "Solidarity".
In the book Lem in the Polish People's Republic, on the example of an interpreter's assistance fund that Lem wanted to establish – and everything was screwed up with the martial law – I tried to show this mechanism, in which we were thrown into decades of self-organization.
In August 1980 Lem was not the only 1 who felt the urge to do something for the good of the general public. At that time, it was common to set up various neighbourhood, settlement, rural, plant committees – and to settle tiny matters, specified as "to yet make the pavement".
The martial law meant the dissolution of all organizations, not just “Solidarity”. He killed this rabble, driving society into a kind of learned helplessness – "it is not worth trying, due to the fact that at any minute power can come and break down."
1989 did not bring a revival of self-organization, as we then adopted in the package a neoliberal imagination of the state as a service institution. "I pay my taxes and I request it, so I want this sidewalk done right now."
Kaczysm, which combines hatred for everything bottom-up, civic and self-government, together with the top-down offer of "sit quietly, citizen, we will give you any scrap" is in this sense the highest form of neoliberalism. I realize citizens who like to scrap+ than deficiency it, but mostly I think that we cannot have good things due to this attitude.
The symbol of these times, which I will tell my grandchildren about, is for me the spontaneous reception point that appeared at the Markus ILO S17. Regardless of the passage, practically all traffic between the border and Warsaw goes there, and at the same time for south-east drivers is the first civilized ILO, with McDonalds, BP and a large toilet (such that the full journey can be without a queue).
The reception point is run by local government and volunteers. While I was there, I did not see representatives of the state (in the sense of the headquarters, due to course the self-government is besides a state).
The Prime Minister will now be pulling out his chest to the awards, but this helpful lash is mostly bottom-up. I do not deny that at another reception points you see territorials, police and border guards, but even there you first announcement what the citizens themselves organised. Without this self-organization, these points would look a lot scarier.
That's what it looks like in the West, that's what we knew mostly from literature. That in crisis situations, people meet first in a "comunion" or another "city hall" and jointly find how to fight Hitler / zombie apocalypse / UFO invasion.
We have scenes like this in Stephen King's prose. They seemed exotic to me at the time, because, to tell you the truth, I didn't think that in a crisis, I should go to the National Council. Government for me for a long time was just a place to go for any paper.
So this war has made us west, at least in this respect. Let us hope that this translates into political attitudes and that we start to respect parties that are more self-government and self-organization.
What he will do with the west, I dare not yet forecast. This depends besides much on what lines on the map will appear from the peace conference.
So far I am amazed to see how various things that until yesterday were impossible – like the confiscation of the estates of the oligarchs and their families – are now abruptly possible. I besides hope that this is the end of the atomic power blogging and the acceleration of independency from fossil fuels.
I besides hope that war will force the widely understood West to consider who we are and what our values are. As for me, Zelenski is simply a walking personification of my values.
May this war bring success to specified leaders, and the defeat of grandfathers specified as Putin, Trump or Lukashenko.
