These aren’t my first protests—far from it. As the child of Polish American immigrant activists, I was raised on this form of expression. Even before I understood Polish politics or why we were marching, my community taught me to fight for freedom from tyranny.

But during these protests, my community has been silent. And that pains me tremendously. I find I can no longer reconcile the values I was raised with, with a lot of what I’m seeing in my community today.

I think back to my first protests, in search of understanding what went wrong.

*

I am 8 years old. It’s December, and the wind whips off Lake Michigan and snow crunches under my cold feet. Our small group slowly walks in a circle. The adults carry signs and chant in thick Polish accents: Stop Red Terror. We are in front of a gray stone building. All the curtains are pulled closed. Round and round we go.

My 5-year-old brother walks next to me. Sometimes we join in the chants and imitate the accents: Stop Ret Terro. Every once in a while, we get to warm up inside a van, where adults give us hot tea. And then back outside, back into the circle we go.

We return often to march in front of this building. It is called the “consulate.” Polish people work in it, but they don’t want Poland to be free. The Polish flag hangs outside, but the eagle that flies on it has no crown. It’s supposed to, though, my dad tells me. “The communists took the crown off the Polish eagle,” he says.

Martial law. I see the phrase in papers. I watch grainy footage of a balding man explain why it is necessary. I overhear things when the adults come to our house at night. “Arrest” and “show trial.” The adults are angry that the balding man lies so much.

In the spring, the protests get louder. By the summer, there are so many people that I get lost in the crowd.

Someone picks me up and hoists me onto a newspaper stand. There’s a bus stop sign above it that I conk my head on. When I start crying, a woman sees me and calls out: “Don’t cry, little one. Someday Poland will be free.”

That fall, an activist priest in Poland is kidnapped and killed by three police officers who are in the “secret police.” The next protest at the gray building is silent. People hold candles, and the priest’s photo.

The priest has a kind face. I look at all the faces around me. So many are crying.

*

Stop Ret Terro. Because terror it was. Life in post-World War II Poland was grim. One-fifth of the country’s citizens—mostly civilians—had perished during the war, including 90 percent of its Jewish population. Poland’s infrastructure was devastated: the capital, Warsaw, was bombed so heavily that it was nearly leveled. The economy struggled to stabilize.

The communist yoke, imposed by Soviet influence, never took. Anti-government protests and strikes began in the 1950s and intensified in the 1960s and 1970s. The more Poles protested, the more the Soviets clamped down. The economy bottomed out. There were regular power outages and shortages of everything, from food to manufacturing equipment.

My parents, who were born in Poland in 1943, were raised on a regular diet of propaganda about amazing Mother Russia, and terrible capitalist America. They met at music school: My father studied piano and jazz, and my mother musical theory. Artists got special privileges, including travel to places like Siberia and Sweden. And then, to America. My dad went first, traveling on an extended artist visa in the mid-1970s, to play in Chicago jazz clubs. My mom and I followed half a year later.

Politics were heating up back home, where an economic recession threatened to throw Poland into bankruptcy. Poland’s Solidarity movement, which emerged from the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc and became a 9 million member-strong anti-communist social revolution, was in full swing, and striking workers demonstrated in the streets. In what would be their last-ditch effort to regain control, in December 1981 the communist government declared martial law and imposed severe restrictions on everyday life: no gatherings, no protests, no inter-city travel, wire taps in public phone booths, a complete media blackout, a curfew monitored and enforced by military tanks and military units. Thousands of activists were thrown into prison without charges. Some were killed.

When the authorities declared martial law, my parents were among the first protestors in Chicago. They had earlier started an organization, Pomost, which means “bridge.” Now, people were always at our house, talking into the night about who was arrested back home, who was freed, and who the communists were spying on now.

We marched and protested for two years, until martial law was lifted and Poland was free again. For years after that, we watched the country pursue a liberal, progressive, pro-democracy and pro-EU agenda, achieving economic stability and growth. Once an adult, I went to work for the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., launching a social media program that was rolled out to all the Polish diplomatic missions around the world—including the Polish consulate I’d marched under when I was a child.

I made videos, unearthed never-before-seen photos of the embassy at the Library of Congress, and interviewed all the interesting people—film director Agnieszka Holland, for one—who came through the embassy. I loved sharing Poland’s history and its innovative present, and poured myself into the work.

*

Today I watch Poland—my beloved, strong homeland that suffered, and fought and fought and fought, and finally broke free—slowly become the thing it once feared and battled against. I am outraged. And heartbroken.

There’s an election in 2015, and Poland elects a strongly right-wing government. The vote is pretty close, 52 percent to 48 percent, and pretty evenly split. Urban areas and western Poland (closer to Europe) vote for the progressive incumbent, while rural and eastern Poland (closer to Russia) vote for the conservative challenger, Andrzej Duda.

Duda and the ruling party preach strongly nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-woman, and anti-Other rhetoric. Their policies follow suit. Parliament proposes a strict anti-abortion ban in 2016. The ban does not pass—tens of thousands of women across Poland march in protest, holding wire hangers—but in fall 2020 the government issues restrictions on abortion anyway. Polish women around the world again take to the streets. As of this writing, they are still protesting.

Also in 2020, the loudly pro-Trump Duda declares in his re-election campaign that LGBTQ+ is an “ideology more dangerous than communism” that must be stamped out. Same-sex marriage and civil unions are illegal in Poland, but hate speech gets a free pass. Nearly 100 small cities across Poland declare themselves “LGBT-free zones.” “Beware the rainbow plague!” the Catholic archbishop of Krakow thunders.

Many people protest this, too. The EU chimes in, warning about the dangers of this rhetoric. Still, Duda is re-elected. The majority of Polish Americans with dual citizenship who participate in the Polish elections vote for him.

*

In America, we’re having our own issues. I march and protest—and this time I know exactly why and what for. As I kneel at a silent vigil for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in Brooklyn this summer, I watch as a mother cradles her young son. Tears stream down my face as I think about the people who want to harm him because of the color of his skin.

I obsessively scour for news of any response to BLM from the Polish American community. I see nothing until May 2020, when a monument of a Polish general gets defaced in Washington, D.C.

This general, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, was one of the good ones. In 1776, he escaped Poland and joined the American cause during the Revolutionary War, acting heroically at the Battle of Saratoga and designing the defenses at West Point military academy during the height of the Revolutionary War. He was a buddy of Thomas Jefferson who despised slavery; the two had a lengthy written correspondence, in which Kosciuszko tried to persuade Jefferson just how loathsome slavery was. In his will, Kosciuszko left his fortune to Jefferson and begged Jefferson to use it to free the enslaved people at Monticello. Jefferson, as we know, did none of that.

During anti-police brutality protests after George Floyd’s killing, some people spray paint Kosciuszko’s statue, as well as the other statues in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. BLM tags, an anarchy symbol or two.

A Polish reporter tweets about it. He stands under the Kosciuszko monument and asks passers-by if they know who Kosciuszko is (they do not). His feed and a subsequent article race through the Polish American community—which loses its collective mind.

Not because a man was murdered by police. Not because a woman was shot to death in her own bed. Not because the president of the U.S. uses the same authoritarian tactics they once fled: tear gas, overzealous police in riot gear, a staged photo op in front of a church. Not because the people being targeted are our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, our family.

No, Polish Americans are upset that this monument—“Our monument! Our compatriot! Our hero!”—got spray painted. They have a lot to say about it. I see countless social media posts, emails, and news articles complaining about “desecration.” There are condescending denunciations of the American educational system: “What are we teaching our youth if we aren’t teaching them about Kosciuszko and his values?”

The Polish ambassador piles on via Twitter. The Embassy of Poland in the U.S. retweets and agrees. When I worked at the embassy, I started that Twitter feed to highlight the embassy’s diplomatic work, and to share interesting Polish cultural and historical tidbits—photos from events, gorgeous artwork and furnishings from the embassy building. Now I scroll through the comments and see hatred and condemnation for the protestors. I feel nauseated as I see the n-word, over and over again.

I try to engage with people on Facebook, gently attempting to steer the conversation toward the ideals he fought for and his anti-slavery stance. But most people cannot connect what is so clear for me: Kosciuszko hated slavery. What’s happening now is an extended form of slavery. Kosciuszko would have spoken out against it. We should too.

Many Polish Americans support Donald Trump, joining a number of immigrant groups who embrace his rhetoric. Many come from communities for whom the word “communist” is anathema, and Ronald Reagan was a saint. These groups readily believe messaging that Democrats will usher in socialism—a concept which remains murkily undefined, but is irrefutably Bad and Wrong.

To me, what’s truly Bad and horribly Wrong is turning a blind eye toward the suffering of oppressed groups and individuals, and undermining the foundation of American democracy. I learned my ideals from my parents and their protester friends; from Polish scouts, Polish-language school, Polish books and movies and conversations. Truth above all. Freedom and honor. Worth based not on religion or race, but in how you move through this world. The right to dissent; the right to speak out. The courage to stand up to hatred and bigotry. The fortitude to help others: to not just empathize with those who suffer, but to help them in their struggle. To protest and march with them, like we once did. To fight against authoritarianism, like we once did.

I cannot reconcile my community’s past and its present. BLM protests continue, and the Polish American community remains silent, hiding inside that gray building, curtains tightly drawn.

Outside, people are protesting and screaming. Human rights are being trampled. But the tags and graffiti are gone from the monuments in Lafayette Park. The statue is clean.

The post The Damning Silence of Polish Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I doubt it.

While this now-concluding decade has seen autocrats rise and democracy decline around the globe, no unelected ruler of the 2010s has set as seductive an example of unaccountable authoritarianism as Queen Elsa, the monarch at the center of the Frozen franchise.

For all its lovely images and irresistible songs, Frozen celebrates the illogic of monarchs from Louis XIV to Trump: l’etat c’est moi, or “the state is me,” reflecting the idea that a society is defined by the feelings and needs of its rulers.

Sadly, the blame for this animated attack on democratic values falls on our fellow Californians—specifically, Disney executives, writers, and animators. They are the most powerful players in the great California-based enterprise of exporting narratives that capture children’s imaginations, and thus shape the future of culture and politics worldwide. Unfortunately, these creative Californians—who live in a state built on the promise that you can live like a king—prefer tales of princes, princesses, and other pretty people whose power is not derived from the consent of the governed.

I’m sorry if this sounds overwrought, but I’ve suffered under the Frozen tyranny personally. My three kids are among the hundreds of millions of people who loved the original Frozen film, an animated tale of a young Scandinavian queen named Elsa, who has the magical voice of Idina Menzel, the power to create ice with her hands, and a loyal-to-the-death sister, Anna (Kristen Bell).

But the overwhelming success of that 2013 film—$1.2 billion in global box office and two Oscars—has become a form of cultural oppression. The film’s best-selling soundtrack, its ubiquitous swag, its endless YouTube fan videos have made Frozen inescapable, so visible and audible in our lives as to raise questions about whether Disney marketers are violating the Geneva Convention. The torture is worst for parents; by my rough count, I’ve seen the movie 25 times—not once of my own free will.

I would compare Frozen’s cultural tyranny to that of the sloppy neo-authoritarians—Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan—who now dominate media and politics worldwide. Except that Disney is a more effective, disciplined, and ambitious demagogue than any of these guys. Here in America, Frozen’s dominance of the media has lasted six years, while Trump has monopolized the headlines for only three.

To be fair, the filmmakers clearly intended their 2013 movie as a celebration of loyalty and familial love. We are meant to identify with Elsa, who becomes queen of the kingdom of Arendelle when her parents are lost at sea. She can’t control her ice-making powers, so, after setting off an epic winter freeze, she flees to an ice castle in the mountains. Anna chases after her. Eventually—after adventures including a scary monster, a reindeer, romance, and trolls who mercifully aren’t on Facebook—love and magic conquer all, and Elsa and Anna return to Arendelle to continue their monarchical rule.

The seeming villain of this piece is Anna’s boyfriend Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, who is left in charge of Arendelle when Elsa abandons her post. Hans is portrayed as the bad guy because he doesn’t really love Anna and because he seeks to retain power when Elsa returns to reclaim her throne.

But I don’t think he’s the real villain. After my first half-dozen-or-so forced viewings of the film, I began to see Hans—voiced by the Tony Award-winning actor Santino Fontana, the Stockton-born son of a schoolteacher and an agronomist—as the film’s flawed and tragic hero.

While Elsa and Anna are unelected rulers consumed with their own personal dramas, Hans is the only character in the movie who thinks about the needs of Arendelle’s traumatized citizens, who barely register in the film.

When Elsa leaves her people in total darkness after a disaster of her own making (who does she think she is—PG&E?), Hans steps in to comfort the public, hand out blankets and food, and try to find some way to end the winter. He, unlike the narcissistic and irresponsible Elsa, sees climate change as a real emergency.

So I, for one, find it hard to blame Hans when, upon Elsa’s return, he tries to slay a tyrant who effectively abdicated her throne during a national crisis. His action would seem to qualify both as a good-faith defense of Arendelle’s national security, and as a brave application of the Jeffersonian principle that the people possess the right of revolution against dictators.

Of course, this is a film for young people, who, as the political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk have shown, are turning against democracy. So Hans is thrown into a dungeon without trial. Meanwhile, Elsa melts all the ice she created. Then, instead of rallying her administration to respond to the dangerous flooding that such a sudden melt would produce, she holds a party outside her castle—thus establishing the emergency response model followed by the federal government after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.

For the sequel, I’d been hoping to see Arendelle’s residents rise up against the monarch, free the political prisoner Hans, and turn their kingdom into another robust Scandinavian social democracy. Alas, Frozen 2’s plot is instead an imperial adventure about an enchanted forest and the royal sisters who continue their undemocratic rule.

By this point in the column, you may say that we shouldn’t worry about a computer-animated fantasy. But mass entertainment has a huge impact on how we think and feel. Animated films from the Disney empire have inspired major social shifts—most notably Bambi, which spawned the environmental movement, not to mention a population explosion of deer. And Disney has never been more powerful than it is right now, with the corporate bullies from Burbank having bought up Marvel and Star Wars properties to form a veritable cartel of fantasy.

So, while our current civic problems are rightfully pinned on white supremacy, economic dislocation and digital disruption, Frozen shouldn’t entirely escape blame.

It’s understandable that frustrated parents, given the difficulty of finding childcare, might use this film to distract their kids temporarily with sweet songs. But I worry about the long-term effects of these movies. One question: If we’re going to teach our children to sing along with an unaccountable autocrat like Elsa, how will we ever muster the social consensus to remove real-life authoritarians from office?

The post <i>Frozen</i>’s Queen Elsa Is a Dangerous Autocrat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before Hamilton reached his political apotheosis in George Washington’s cabinet, he immigrated to the mainland North American colonies from Nevis, an island in the British West Indies. Like his contemporaries Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton was a British subject, but upon arrival in New Jersey in 1772, he lacked their wealth, familial lineage, elite status, and American roots. In short, he was an outsider—a “Bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar,” as John Adams described him.

Eventually, Hamilton would leverage a combination of service in the Revolutionary War, a strategic marriage into an old New York family, and the professional legitimacy of a successful law practice to transform himself into a member of a new generation of elite Americans.

Following the battle of Yorktown in October 1781, Hamilton returned to his pregnant wife Elizabeth in Albany, New York and began preparing for admission to the New York bar. He was an astonishingly quick study; with only a few months of preparation behind him, Hamilton was fully admitted to practice in New York’s Supreme Court by October 1782. By 1783, Hamilton had qualified to practice in the Court of Chancery as well. Just as Hamilton joined the ranks of New York lawyers, the postwar legal tensions between Patriots and Loyalists intensified.

Hamilton threw himself into the political and legal thick of this battle. During and immediately after the Revolutionary War, New Yorkers were engaged in a bitter struggle to distinguish worthy insiders (Patriots) from traitorous outsiders (Loyalists). The stakes were high; wartime destruction of property, bloodshed, and the lengthy British occupation of New York City made reconciliation a hard sell among New Yorkers divided by their wartime loyalties.

Not only did Patriot New Yorkers liken British-sympathizers in their midst to an “impure nest of Vipers,” but the people of New York also backed legislative efforts to punish and exclude Loyalists by preventing them from enjoying the rights and liberties granted through law and citizenship.

Through a trio of particularly vituperative laws—the Citation, Trespass, and Confiscation Acts—the state denied Loyalists their right to collect debts owed to them as well as their procedural due process rights (including the right to appeal to higher courts, and to wage appropriate legal defenses in court). The state also attainted British sympathizers (thereby declaring them treasonous) and confiscated their property.

And so in New York, a revolution fought under the banner of expunging monarchical tyranny resulted in a new form of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority over a powerless, unpopular minority.

By this time—the mid-1780s—Hamilton, having achieved his own insider status, used this newly acquired position and profession to fight against the vindictive wrongs inflicted on Loyalists. The state of New York considered British-sympathizing men and women to be foreign usurpers—no matter that some of them considered themselves to be, in the wake of war, American citizens and no longer British subjects.

Hamilton used the tools of the common law to fight the harshness of New York’s trio of anti-Loyalist statutes. He pursued novel defense strategies in court, appealed to a higher law (the law of nature) over state statute, petitioned the legislature for mercy, exploited legal technicalities, and tried to reason with the people of New York. While publishing essays under the pseudonym Phocion, Hamilton implored New Yorkers to stop punishing Loyalists. He explained that Patriots were setting an insidious precedent through the state’s treatment of Loyalists by dismantling the rights of an unpopular minority.

And if this were allowed today, then what would stop the state from dismantling the rights of Patriots tomorrow?

Eventually, Hamilton’s legal defense of the New York Loyalists was successful. Through state court decisions and changes to New York state statutes (as well as the eventual ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights), the property and procedural rights of all New Yorkers, no matter their wartime sympathies, were better secured. Almost a century later, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution continued the work of protecting and preserving the rights of American citizens as well as any person (including non-citizens) in the United States.

Today, Hamilton’s experience defending Loyalists in New York should remind us of two different things. First, for centuries American “insiders” have cleverly and cruelly used law as a tool to exclude, punish, and justify their fears of “outsiders.” And, second, that the law can be used, as Hamilton employed it in his post-war practice, to protect even an unpopular few from a powerful majority.

Hamilton did not resolve the persistent tension at the heart of the American experiment in self-government: Should the popular will in our democracy trump the protections of transcendent law grounded in nature, due process, and constitutional principles? But he set an early precedent that defined the country. To be American is to keep up the fight for certain transcendent principles so that they will always prevail over the prejudices of any era.

The post How Alexander Hamilton Fought the Tyranny of the Majority appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.