Wisdom March Goes On

It is time to change the paradigm.

I read a poster in a human rights Telegram channel yesterday: a webinar "Propaganda of evil: how to resist delirium and teach this to your grandmother." They promised an expert will give a lecture there: a media trainer, a human rights activist and a journalist, all in one person. The poster also included that after the purge of independent media, it became so difficult to understand the facts and distinguish truth from lies, but the webinar will help and teach you how to disabuse your grandmother.

Dear media trainers and other experts. If you seriously think that the main problem of the information war is a "conditional grandmother", then it is better to disabuse yourself and look at the dates finally. What year is it now? That's better.

I fully understand: nothing has changed in the country for almost thirty years and this tin can in which we find ourselves affects the psyche of everyone. So many people think that time does not move at all, it froze along with the country, and people also froze along with time. And that same eighty-year-old grandmother who voted for Lukashenka in 1994 is still sitting in her wooden peasant house and watching TV. No, guys, thirty years have passed. Change the paradigm.

Trainers and other webinar organizers consider today's grandmothers the same ones who elected Lukashenka in 1994, but they were forty-year-old Belarusians at that time. Do you want me to remind you what they were like, these Belarusians of the early nineties? They stopped factories and marched to the city center, blocking the streets. They gathered hundreds-thousands-strong rallies on the square without any Telegram channels or social media. They hid their graduation certificates to become "tourist traders" because they needed to feed their children. They didn't complain but survived. They elected Zianon Pazniak and Stanislau Shushkevich, Viktar Hanchar and Andrei Klimau to the Supreme Council. They overturned police cars during the Chernobyl Way. They started a business from scratch. They stood in front of the building of the Supreme Council, ready to protect their deputies in the event of an assault. Are you going to teach them to distinguish truth from propaganda? They have experienced many other difficult things in their lives, such an experience teaches you much better and without your will to discern.

Do you remember the famous marches of pensioners in 2020? Every Monday, old ladies and gentlemen (whoever came up with the idea of calling them "grandparents"?) gathered in the center of Minsk for the Wisdom Marches. They walked a many-kilometer march, fought off the security forces, protecting each other, raised flags, chanted “Go away!” and “Long live Belarus!”. They were dispersed with batons, flash-noise cartridges and tear gas, pushed into prison vans and tried behind courts. They received fines many times higher than their pension incomes but still took to the streets. Every Monday In December 2020, as the usual Sunday marches faded away, pensioners continued to march on Mondays. They danced around the Christmas tree in the square near the Red Church, slipping on the ice, and risked spending New Year's Eve in a "monkey house" [detention facility - Ed.], but kept doing it.

By the way, Dzmitry Karsiuk, who judged 81-year-old Wisdom March participant Safia Minko, was 25 years old. Like most prosecutors, investigators, judges who have been sending Belarusians to prison in cold blood for two years now. Not to mention the riot police officers and other GUBOPik [Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption - Ed.] officers. Strange as it may seem at first glance, but mostly young people become punishers. These are people who grew up under Lukashenka and accepted the rules of the game since their childhood. And the current pensioners in the early nineties tried to establish their own rules, and not accept someone else's.

So it is necessary to divide not into grandparents and youngsters, but into smart people and idiots, noble and scoundrels, Belarusians and occupiers. By the way, one day we will all become grandparents. This will be very good news for each of us, because it will mean that we survived and won. And we'll tell our grandchildren: “One day we were standing in a hitch, and then a prison van was driving up ...” And slip a textbook on the history of Belarus: "Look, dear, it’s written about us and our revolution." And our grandchildren will be ironic, of course (as they should be), but they will also be proud of us.

So let's be proud of our pensioners. It was they who made Belarus an independent state many years ago. It was they who were standing on the cold, slushy streets to the last. There would be no Revolution of Dignity without them. There would be no Belarus without them.

Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

If you like this article, you can support the website Charter97.org

MULTI-CURRENCY ACCOUNT FOR ASSISTANCE:

Bank's name: Bank Millennium S.A.
Address: ul. Stanislawa Zaryna, 2A, 02-593, Warszawa
IBAN: PL 97 1160 2202 0000 0002 1671 1123
SWIFT: BIGBPLPW
Name of the account holder: Fundacja “KARTA ‘97”
Purpose/title of payment: Donation for statuary aims

You can contact us by the e-mail charter97@gmail.com