Belarus is alive!

What matters is the resonance of the joint effort.

There are different types of patience. There can be humble patience when you resignedly accept oppressive circumstances, even if you latently disagree with them. Or there is expectant patience, when you constantly ponder what is happening, and when hope persists - turning to the possibility of a different future.

The first kind of patience does not have a "limit", it is the path of submissive survival, "in spite of everything." In the second case, the question of the "limit" is the question of the appropriateness and method of moving from patience to decisive action.

But I would like to emphasize that you can get out of the state of wait-and-see patience without ceasing to adhere to the policy of non-violence, which I consider to be the only correct one. Actions prepared both tactically and strategically can be called expedient.

As for the terms ("how long can they put up with this?"), it is worth recalling the example of the Polish "Solidarity". We must try not to lose heart because we have entered the phase of expectant patience; the main thing is that it should not be deformed into humbleness.

People endure more than injustice. It is about contempt for our life - to our existence as Us, as living polyphony. It irritates the authorities, causes rejection in them.

We are forced to live in the conditions of non-recognition of us as citizens - like a zoon politikon. The supporters of change were identified as enemies from whom the territory must be cleared. Therefore, the category of injustice is not enough.

If injustice becomes the "new normal", it means that people who form a vulnerable group ("zmagars") are, in principle, perceived by the authorities as less valuable. This devaluation extends to everyone / everyone as a living person.

Therefore, it is so painful to watch how people cover their faces in new photos with white-red-white flags so as not to be identified. This forced self-depersonalization is one of the most terrible manifestations of terror. It triggers such social and psychological mechanisms, which are very difficult to resist.

Yes, we are all crushed by a colossal mass of violence, physical, institutional, symbolic, and it gains momentum precisely when people's lives are no longer viewed as valuable or equal.

But there is an important difference between our political situation and the Stalin era. Stalin's legitimacy was unquestionable, the communist ideology had no alternative, therefore terror was assimilated and spread as an autoimmune formation - a monstrous, but "one of our own", fueled by the collective sacrificial heroic pathos of the "builders of communism."

Most of our citizens have formed a distance in relation to the ruling regime. People do not identify themselves with Lukashenka's "we" and tolerate the regime as a forced evil that does not have the necessary legitimacy under it, they tolerate it as something deeply alien. It is in this distance that the guarantee of the future victory of the democratic forces is.

If people support this discrepancy, articulate it everywhere, the time of the current government will end. The deteriorating economic situation does not play a key role here (take, for example, the fall of the Ceausescu regime). What matters is the resonance of the joint effort.

And we see that the society has not resigned itself: using the language of Gramsci, we can say that there is a trench warfare in the media, as well as a maneuverable actionist war in the streets, in public places, in various institutions.

Tatsiana Shytzova, "Belarusians and the Market"