Integration Nightmare

A few days before my talk on repression in Belarus and the war in Ukraine, I exchanged messages with a comrade who frequently organizes events about Ukraine at various leftist and anti-fascist conferences. She told me about something that had happened to her: she had been invited to speak at an anti-fascist event alongside a comrade who had fought in Ukraine and was able to travel abroad. The presentation and discussion were scheduled for the evening, and everything looked pretty good. At the last minute, the organizers decided to push the Ukraine topic aside and replace it with Palestinian guests. The opportunity to speak about Ukraine arose early the next morning, but they weren’t able to draw a particularly large crowd. My comrade got incredibly angry at the Palestinians, who had “taken” her spot at the event. To me, this approach seemed extremely strange. After all, it wasn’t the Palestinians who made the decision about the speaking time or the rescheduling of the event itself, was it? And for me, all of this was the last straw. This story is about how various activist groups from the periphery fight for the attention of people with resources in the hope of getting help.

To me, my friend from Ukraine’s initial reaction is perfectly understandable: you have a goal of raising money and trying to draw attention to what’s happening to your comrades, and you’re trying to achieve it. But how often are we forced to compete for a spot on the stage so that people from the “first” world will hear us for just a brief moment? This strange “Olympics of genocides,” in which different groups of sufferers compete to entertain a Western audience. We can show anger, hatred, sadness, grief, and even cry, and the audience we come to may, for a moment, share these feelings rooted in deep trauma. But after a short time, our stories are forgotten, and they are replaced by the stories of other people who have come to the cities in an attempt to gather whatever meager resources they can for survival and struggle. We travel across Europe, lugging merchandise, books, and pamphlets, and wearing down our own health and strength—not because Western anarchists or anti-fascists have shown some incredible level of solidarity over the years. We travel through Germany, France, Sweden, and other countries because of the deep economic divide between our regions. And despite all our efforts, most of those who talk about international solidarity rarely actually devote more than 90 minutes to our issues. In all the decades I’ve been working with Western anarchists, only a few dozen have decided to travel to Belarus to support our comrades there. Slightly more people traveled to Ukraine because of the visa-free travel arrangement.

And despite all this, we continue to compete with one another for attention and resources, all to entertain those we consider our comrades. I get the impression that something needs to change radically—for us as well as for Europeans—but I don’t feel like anything will change anytime soon. Belarusians, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Iranians, and many others simply have no choice but to keep calling for solidarity and collecting pennies in the hope that someone will chip in at least a ruble. The “Olympics of Genocide” will continue as long as there is no genuine international solidarity.