In the case of Poland, these narratives peaked in 2019-2020 during a hate campaign orchestrated by the state including high officials and institutions; the president and prime minister, state television and radio, the prosecutor’s office and the police. Surviving, resisting, and pushing back against them shaped a whole generation of activists, including myself. Here are some of the most important insights and lessons learned I want to share with anyone who faces a similar attack. These are by no means universal as any such situation will be context-sensitive, but they might still be useful, highlighting challenges faced by both our organizations and ourselves as individuals.

Lesson 1: Apathy

When you find yourself under attack your first instinct will be to fight back and quickly. But fighting without preparation is not smart. You cannot and should not fight state-sponsored disinformation alone. The sheer scope and magnitude of communications orchestrated by the government make it impossible to counter using any tools available to civic society organizations. If you try to respond, and of course, you will as staying silent will be too difficult, you will start playing a rigged game, risking burning out and talking to an increasingly apathetic audience. Your main difficulty will be to reclaim actual agency as competing with the flood of lies and manipulations will seem like a lost cause. If you are not careful, you will become apathetic as well.

However, what CSOs can do better than any populist government is reaching out to people from the position of shared lived experience rather than power. Developing messages aimed at constituents–or people who are the closest to the CSO’s mission and values–should be your first response. Instead of constructing from scratch, use real stories that amplify real people’s voices. Focus on calling out the violence without glossing over it or trying to provide your audience with forced optimism. Tell their (and your) story and be real about it.

Lesson 2: Anger

Although positive values are always better in the long run, we cannot afford to be picky with what motivates us in times of existential crisis. There is strength in coming together in anger and the sense of unity it provides can be equally useful to run a productive team strategy meeting or a street protest. Let yourself and those who work with you be angry. Acknowledge the hurt and injustice of what is going on. It will help you combat (or accept) fear and move on to more constructive ways of coping.

Two years of nonstop hateful propaganda, when the most powerful people in Poland kept on calling our community child molesters, a deadly plague, and a threat worse than Bolsheviks, made us afraid. Because of this many LGBT+ people were rejected by families, classmates, and colleagues at work. Some of us left the country forever. Yet, many others organized and resisted. The number of Pride marches tripled with more than 25 new groups taking to the streets across the country. Some faced physical violence from thugs calling themselves patriots. Some were pacified by the police, arrested, and terrorized. Others participated in massive online actions publishing “I’m LGBT+, a human being, not an ideology” on their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

We needed to say “Yes, we are afraid and it's unbearable” before we were able to shout “Enough”. Our community found its courage but only when we acknowledged our fears and transformed them into anger. Not accepting fear may make you lose your window of opportunity to unify and become visible. Later on, if things get really bad, you may lose your chance to speak completely.

Lesson 3: Pride

One natural response to chronic stress is becoming numb to most things. With time your whole perception might shift in a way that not only protects you from freezing when facing danger but also from recognizing and celebrating the good things that happen. Numbness signifies a total victory of populists over activists. When we become numb, we can no longer discern between success and failure, the usual and the unusual risk or chance. Also, we usually get sick.

Traditionally, “pride” has been the symbol of choice for LGBT+ movements due to its clear opposition to shame. Shame is understood as the umbrella term for dehumanization, discrimination, and oppression faced by our community for ages, and each LGBT+ person individually since their childhood. Regardless of the different life experiences of lesbian women, gay men, transgender people and all other queers, our shared goals and struggles became the source of unity and strength. This solidarity allowed people to stop living in survival mode, stop begging, and start demanding recognition as human beings, and citizens, but also as family members, neighbors, and coworkers. For our movement, the need for social and political change has always been just as important as the ability to come and heal together from the trauma we experienced. This need established the Pride marches as a unique mixture of celebration and political protest.

There is a lesson here for all activists who face numbing oppression. Campaigning, communication, and advocacy efforts require resilience that stems from community building. There can be no community without celebration. Allow yourself to celebrate even the smallest of successes. You are still going, your team has not quit, you secured funding, organized an event, reached the mainstream media, persuaded an influencer to speak… Recognize each step as bigger than it seems, because it probably is more extraordinary than you think.

Lesson 4: Nuance

Unity and solidarity are always precarious. Vulnerable to infighting, internal conflicts fueled by hostility of the external world, they require care and wisdom. Then there is the temptation of maintaining unity (or building support) by staying on a very general level of postulates and narratives sacrificing uncomfortable differences. Dumbing down and simplifying your message to make it more palpable for the general audience may seem like a necessity and sometimes it is. The same rule applies to omitting differences between parties forming coalitions or even subsuming their identities under a common, watered-down manifesto. Such a strategy may secure allies and audiences for now but be sure that every bump you had worked so hard to flatten will reemerge sooner or later.

One way of addressing this risk is always leaving space for nuance. Take campaigning on the platform of “democracy” and “European standards” for example. In a society where such messaging gives you easier access to broad audiences who react positively to such slogans, it will be your job to explain what exactly those concepts mean if applied in practice. If your “democracy”-lovers tend to be also racist or homophobic, they will probably react poorly to you flying a rainbow flag or demanding recognition for Roma people or asylum-seekers. They will feel better not thinking about those things as part of the democracy package and you will be tempted not to tell them otherwise, but you will have to do it nevertheless. Because of integrity, but also because your opponents will be telling them about it every time they have the chance.

Populists weaponize prejudice and prejudice thrives when the public debate is based on general, foggy concepts. By not addressing them with the concrete, the tangible you will make them stronger. You have no choice but to add nuance and deepen the narrative by adding human stories whenever you can. Yes, we fight for democracy, yes, we oppose violence and corruption, and here are the people who embody this fight. Here is the broad coalition of people–some of whom you might not know or like–who fight for all of us, who fight for you. This is us and these are our stories.

During the first pro-democratic protests in Poland, people were asked not to bring rainbow flags as too divisive. We brought them anyway and after less than 2 years, people attending protests cheered for LGBT+ organizations as we spoke from every stage.

Hope is hard work

After 8 years of countless examples of abuses of power people in Poland (narrowly) voted the right-wing populist government out of power. After a short period of celebration, CSOs working in the human rights sector struggled with switching from being on the defense to positive action. One year later our postulates still stand as the new government failed to bring about the change they promised. Adapting to this new reality and finding ways of impactful activism is a whole different story but let me just tell you that we would not be doing this still, without hope. And hope is not something that comes to you, but something you make. And it is hard work indeed.

Author: Hubert Sobecki

➡️ Hubert Sobecki is in charge of strategic communications at Love Does Not Exclude Association, an LGBT+ organization based in Warsaw, Poland. For the past 8 years, he has been working on campaigns and anti-disinformation action in a hostile environment fueled by state-sponsored propaganda utilized by the previous Polish government.

Background illustration: xbrchx

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