Confederate press conference attended by Konrad Berkovich, Michał Waver and Roman Fritz in connection with the demands to restrict freedom of expression, 21 November 2023.
Konrad Berkovich:
“It is becoming even more dangerous in Poland than it has been before. Let us remind that in specified a futuristic dystopia, Orwell's novel, which wrote this fresh under the influence of the practice of Stalinism, we are dealing with something like thought crime. reasoning crime is simply a crime of reasoning against the large Brother organization line. And pursuing this crime in this fresh is the alleged thought Police. Unfortunately, it's not precisely futurology anymore. It becomes a Polish reality.
– The fresh coalition, by the mouth of Mrs Gajewski and Mr Lubnauer, announced that it would introduce into the penal code the pursuit of the alleged hatred speech on grounds of alleged sexual orientation and gender. What is hatred speech? The tradition of the Polish language does not know that term. It is known what slander, defamation, insult. But you don't know what a hatred speech is. So that's what somebody's gonna gotta define. And of course politicians and officials will specify it.
– So in practice, it means nothing more than criminal prosecution for expressing views contrary to a peculiar ideology, which is close to a fresh coalition that will most likely shortly rule. This is apparent censorship, an attack on freedom of speech. And apparent creeping totalizm. ...
Michał Wawer:
– Representatives of the future ruling coalition say it won't be a large change. It's just going to clarify the rules, specify what's allowed. This will only be the introduction of Western European standards.
– So let's look at these Western European standards. In 2017, a Swedish pensioner, a 70-year-old man for commenting on the net in which he expressed that Somali immigrants were lazy people who despise work, was sentenced to prison.
A fewer years later, during the French presidential election, presidential candidate Eric Zemmour for a publicist message in the media, in which he formulated a publicist opinion that there was a reversed colonization in France that now the Muslim arrivals in Africa colonize Europe, was court-martialed and sentenced to a gigantic fine of EUR 10,000. And yet another thousands of euros of compensation and penalties for organisations dealing with the fight against racism.
And a comparatively fresh example from 2021. erstwhile a pastor in London, who as a street preacher quoted from the Bible, taught his Protestant variety, tried to convert the English into his religion, he was arrested for saying that matrimony is simply a relation between man and woman. This was interpreted by the English police as a hatred speech.
Words that matrimony is simply a union of men and women are words that we find in the Polish Constitution.
– For the western and, unfortunately, the Polish left, too, these words and a full array of another wordings, which we find in our Constitution, in our laws, in our regular conversations, in the entries, in the comments we leave on the Internet, is simply a speech of hatred. And they will not halt until they train Poles, that 1 cannot say what 1 thinks, that average opinions cannot be formulated, that saying things that 10, 20, 30 years ago were an component of common sense and a way of reasoning all average person, is now something forbidden. Which you can't go out in public with, which you can't tell another people. ...
