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Yes, the Stop Bullshit collective in Warsaw are not going to win hearts and minds with their unapologetic, rainbow-fuelled antics and normally the moderate, third-way politician inside me would shake my head from side-to-side, frowning upon their urban commando methodology. Not today. Today I applaud them for raging against the dying of the light, I applaud their rage against the machine, because if a piece of coloured cloth thrown over a stone likeness of Christ’s face is enough to send a section of the nation into a whiplash of hysteria, then I say: more please.

Stop Bullshit are upholding a noble tradition of peaceful rebellion. Unlike the servile conformists who cower among the ranks of Platforma, they are motivated by raw, undiluted anger at a political class who have turned difference into a crime. For what are PiS really, but a group of unsophisticated, political amateurs intent on monetising the divisions in Poland for their own petty avarice? If anything, Stop Bullshit is more aligned with Christianity than any altar-hugging PiS flagellant. Christ was a rebel. Born a Jew, he rebelled against the orthodoxies of his faith and replaced the God of anger with a God of love. The PiS God is not a good one. This is a God of fear and ignorance and systematic clerical sexual abuse of minors, and needs to be replaced. As Christ cleared the temple of the money-lenders, Stop Bullshit in their primitively energetic and clever way, are clearing the poisonous nettles of bigotry and hypocrisy.

Naturally, you, constant Silesian reader, have your own take on this. Perhaps your view is coloured by a prim sensibility towards sexual proclivities which do not conform with your own. Let’s leave aside what happens in the privacy of 9% of Polish peoples’ bedrooms and look at the situation on both macro and micro levels. The government’s muscular repression of mild demonstrations in defence of LGTB rights is an active example of the Might is Right philosophy. Two weeks ago, marked the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, what amounts to history’s biggest example of undue force. “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America refused peace overtures from Japan and dropped two atomic bombs in August 1945 killing over 100,000 civilians. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal, he was a hawk of the highest order, albeit one who recognised the truth when he saw it. America’s soft power machine has ensured that the moral implications of those bombings are rarely if ever up for consideration. Seventy-five years ago, LeMay was not alone in his verdict. “We had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,” wrote Fleet Admiral William Leahy, in his autobiography, I Was There. Today, in America, to question the morality of the bombings, can be deemed unpatriotic, yet LeMay’s assertion begs us to examine why morality is the exclusive domain of winners. On a personal level, I am against abortion. I do not want to make love to another man, but I respect the choices of those who do. They are not less than me and neither do their choices impinge upon the health and safety of society at large. If the government insists on treating those people as second-class citizens, while actively protecting and enabling clerical sexual abuse, then open rebellion is logical, ethical and essential.

Yet what then about the vague, wooly question of offending the values of others? I recently got involved in a spat on instagram while posting photos of Katowice the other day. I uploaded a picture of the Katyn monument in Plac Andrzeja along with the note, “Love the way the guy on the right is showing off his new earring, but the other two don’t care.” A few people took offence, telling me how their great-grandfathers had been part of the massacre. My remark was directed at the theatrical, slightly disco-ish pose of one of the three soldiers, but deemed offensive for reasons I can only guess at; the frivolous tone was not in keeping with the tragedy endured by the men represented in the sculpture. Or perhaps the insinuation of a murdered soldier wearing a piece of jewelry implied that he was gay and this somehow rendered him unheroic? Sorry, but there have always been gay people in society and thankfully there always will. Gay soldiers, gay footballers, gay priests. Gay carpenters too, I’m reliably told. If anything, the rainbow flags should be draped on all monuments and sculptures so the general public can realise that Poland’s LGTB community is not some small enclave in Warsaw, but everywhere in our society. And for those who take offence, then tough-titty said the kitty. Being gay is not wrong because the winners of an election say it is. Being gay is not wrong because heterosexuals outnumber them 9 to 1. Being gay is being human. To deny this is to deny history, science and beauty. There’s a rebellion going on in Poland. Show your colours. Don’t hang back with the brutes.

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