Białystok is one of the biggest cities in the eastern part of Poland. For a long time Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims have lived in the one area. Białystok is also full of people from Caucasus. Only one far right organisation was able to set up there and be active. Unfortunately this organisation is Blood & Honour.
For many years the local antifascist group Antifa Wildeast have fought both against B&H and local authorities - which not only tolerates Nazis but also helps them. In 2010 police arrested 100 antifascists just before their demonstration started. They arrested them although they didn’t anything wrong. They were just attacked by small group of nazis who used knives.
The antifascists arrested were taken to one place with three B&H members including Artur Wysocki and Marcin Łukaszczuk. The three nazis could do everything they wanted. They could smoke cigarettes, look into mobile phones taken from antifascist by police. One of the officers was taking photos of faces using his private mobile phone and showed them. Connections with local authorities gave Blood & Honour many chances to attack people without punishment. They were terrorising Rromany (Gipsies) and attacking local football fans regularly.
Recently they tried to burn flat of immigrant from Pakistan. One day they attacked an Armenian boxer who defended himself. Police arrested the boxer and the judge gave him probation. A few days later nazis attacked him again using machetes. Faces of two nazis mentioned here by name were recorded but police didn’t do anything.
On Easter night Blood & Honor attacked again. They came into disco club called Pub Fiction and said that they will clean up leftists. Workers of the club kicked them out but one man and one woman were injured by knives. The man died yesterday.
The situation in Białystok is probably the worst in all of Poland. Local authorities allowed two B&H members to organise a gang which terrorises the city.
Photo shows Blood & Honor on the 11th of November march organised in 2009 by National Radical Camp and All Polish Youth. Two nationalist organisations which official denies that they have anything in common with neonazi movement.
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This is really terrible, and shows the extent to which police scum will assist Nazi bonehead scum. I hope for a better situation, where the left will make an improvement for the people under attack. If the police cannot do their job, than the left-wing activist must do it for them.
good post!!
Is there any strong proletarian organisation in the city? There must be some organised physical resistance to this scum, they should learn not to fuck with people.
Do they actually identify as neo-nazis? That makes me wonder how being a polish neo-nazi would function. Do they campaign to deport themselves to germany for forced labor? Or do they think hitler had some great ideas, he just was wrong about who the master race was?
Answers to the above:
No, there is no strong proletarian organization in the city. There is some organized physical resistance (anarchists and antifascists), but because of the very bad situation in that part of Poland (mostly economic), many people from that city / area left to other cities or countries. Some years ago there were more people to fight. In general, these scum are growing in many parts of Poland. It is typical as a response to economic crisis, a reaction also to the EU (nationalists use things) and also there is very strong foreign economic support of various far-right, nationalist, fascist groups.
As to the second question, of self-definition, this is a political trap. All of these crazy groups have interesting alternative labels for themselves. Most are "patriots". One of the worst groups call themselves "autonomists" and steal anarchist symbols. (And, for example, they called for a May Day march and told people to bring black flags.) We could discuss this issue of their own labels for days on end - in any case, as they actively try to whitewash their politics, people want to point out that they are not just normal "patriots", because this is how they are trying to smuggle across their ideology.
Precisely though, few of these groups in Poland call themselves neonazis, and I don't know of many neonazi groups that actually do define themselves this way. Blood and Honor however quite openly refers to nazism. I don't want to put a link here to their page (you can find it if you want), but I can copy what they say about themselves:
Blood & Honor Poland supports the National Socialist ideals and establishes its main goal as fighting for the Aryan culture, traditions, heritage, and the future of our race. Through National Socialism and the White Power ideals we hold the means for the survival of the White Race and our civilization as well as securing the future for next generations. We support the politics, decisions, and methods of activism of Combat 18 and we are loyal to our comrades outside our borders. We have no interest in whatever kind of contact with representatives and sympathizers of the Unity Movement as well as people trying to make money off the NS / White Power movement.
I think that this is perfectly clear and, in this case, the label nazi or neonazi is 100% accurate.
As for what these morons are thinking, I don't know. They are idiots. It reminds me of the Russian nazis from B&H some years ago who complained to their international buddies that they were being discriminated against. Anyway, I actually think that the neonazis these days are divided into the purists/ traditionalists who see Slavs as inferior, as the modernists, who accept Slavs as Aryans.
Blood & Honor/C18 is international organisation.
Here u can read a little in English: http://lauferr.blogspot.com/
We see this here in the Czech Republic too - the German "autonomous nationalist" fashion has been exported around central europe. I don't know about Poland, but here they draw politically on Italian "social fascism", want to emulate Casa Pound, and see themselves as coming from the Italian fascist tradition more than German national socialism. It lets them skirt the slavonic issue and the German occupation (which was admittedly "softer" in Bohemia than Poland).
It also means that they're trying to infiltrate subcultures which would be frowned on by your trad nazis, like Hard Bass. It does show that piss-poor taste in music is a constant on the far right though.
They also steal Antifa symbols flagrantly, which I just can't understand at all as it comes from German stalinism originally. Typical oppurtunism and fascist syncretism I suppose.
Luckily though, they're very marginal here, and though you see stickers everywhere from their web presence all they seem to do is do rubbish collections in the countyside. The bigger problems are large-scale racist demonstrations here which don't need the presence of the far-right.
Well, don't wanna go into a big explanation of all the different fascists here, just because it's too annoying.
We also have those social fascists and now we even see national syndicalists and all sorts of shit. As for stealing slogans, etc., they are very active especially in trying to fuck my group, since we have some well-known slogans. A good example is how they even set up demonstrations with the same names / slogans and try to confuse people.
I was going to publish something about the above-mentioned incident, but it looks like Libcom took away my blog, so you will have to click here: http://cia.media.pl/poland_full_of_blood_and_dishonor
Criticism of a lack of real class-based movements is not limited to Poland: we see the same thing in the Czech Republic and a similar subcultural approach among many antifascists.
Cheers Django and Akai for your reports about the fash where youse are based.
We probably need to be wished luck. We received reports from Katowice that a group of antifascists who wanted to protest against a march of "patriots" or whatever the shit they are, were cordoned off by police and maybe 40-50 people are currently arrested. There are some photos here: http://katowice.naszemiasto.pl/artykul/galeria/1363041,starcia-na-marszu-onr-antyfaszysci-starli-sie-z-policja,2446207,id,t,zid.html#galeria
Damn, that is messed up.
Just an update. In total, 108 people were arrested in Katowice. It looks like 6 people will have some charges. Other people received fines and were coerced with threats of longer detention to take them. As far as I know, the fines total at least 4250 euros.
We went to Bialystok yesterday. Two buses went from Warsaw and were stopped and searched by police on the way. There were detentions of people walking to the demo. It took place anyway, although the police scared off a lot of people with their tactics. I'll send a link to a report in English later. In the meanwhile, here are photos:
http://bialystok.gazeta.pl/bialystok/51,35235,11540823.html?i=0
fixed; must have been done by mistake when we did some behind-the-scenes changes to the blog section. sorry!
Cheers for this, comrade. Keep opposing the scum police and the nazi scum.
Unfortunately it seems that the whole region is plagued by the strong presence of nazis and fascist of all sorts. The complete lack of resistance against these tendencies in these countries is IMO a major concern (in Hungary for instance the resistance means circa 20 people countrywide): I noticed that recently the public discourse of political matters is largely dictated by the far right. With the invention of a new language like, "gypsycrime", regular anti-Semitic abuses against everybody with some endorsement of the left or liberal ideas, and actions like this they make a dangerous, militant guard against any revolutionary awakening.
whilst the article highlights problems in Bialystok perfectly, at the same time is so full of innacuracies it was painful for me to read.
So maybe you could correct the mistakes?
Maybe the name of the pub is wrong, no?
half of the things is wrong there- Armenian boxer was attacked again year later, pub name is right, but the man that died was a victim of separate incident etc... i would need to write a new article to correct the mistakes there..
Writing that news I thought that the guy who died was the guy wounded in Pub Fiction. Most things I wrote was from massmedias.
Well, there may be some imprecise details, but one guy was killed in the rampage and that is why we were outraged and protested. It is true though, on a closer read, that one thing is imprecise: there were a number of attacks and the knife attacks and the killing were two separate ones. From this article it looks like the same.