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Lives oF the orange Men a BiographicaL history oF the poLish orange aLternative MoveMent Major WaLdeMar Fydrych introduction By the yes Men edited By gavin grindon transLated By david French Lives of the Orange Men: A Biographical History of the Polish Orange Alternative Movement Major Waldemar Fydrych ISBN 978-1-57027-269-1 Introduction by the Yes Men Edited by Gavin Grindon Translated by David French Cover design by Jed Carter Interior design by Margaret Killjoy All images courtesy of the Orange Alternative Foundation, unless otherwise stated Tis translation is funded by Te Book Institute: www.bookinstitute.pl Tis publication is co-fnanced by the Minister of Foreign Afairs, Republic of Poland within the framework of a cyclical program “Promotion of knowledge about Poland” Released by Minor Compositions 2014 Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia www.autonomedia.org | [email protected] contents FOREWORD . .V EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION . .1 PREFACE . .5 CHAPTER 1: MAJOR WALDEMAR FYDRYCH. .9 CHAPTER 2: LIEUTENANT ZENON ZEGARSKI . 179 CHAPTER 3: ROBERT JEZIERSKI . 193 CHAPTER 4: ANDRZEJ DZIEWIT . 213 CHAPTER 5: LIEUTENANT PIOTR ‘PABLO’ ADAMCIO . 231 CHAPTER 6: CAPTAIN WIESŁAW CUPAŁA. 241 CHAPTER 7: JOZEF PINIOR. 257 CHAPTER 8: KRZYSZTOF SKIBA . 273 APPENDIX 1: TIMELINE OF ORANGE ALTERNATIVE HAPPENINGS 291 APPENDIX 2: FOREWORD TO THE FIRST POLISH EDITION. 297 APPENDIX 3: THE MANIFESTO OF SOCIALIST SURREALISM . 301 APPENDIX 4: THE ORANGE ALTERNATIVE . 307 ForeWord Mischief and humour are ingredients in every struggle for autonomy, yet they are constantly being erased. All too often, his- tory is written by the terminally serious. When massive liberatory shifts occur, there is a tendency to record the moments as straight- faced, humourless afairs. History becomes a conspiracy (perhaps unwitting, but a conspiracy nonetheless) that robs revolution of its humour and humanity. Tis book is the antidote. It is serious. It is about profoundly meaningful actions during a profoundly meaningful period. But it is about dwarves. It is about silly hats. It is about that which is pear-shaped rather than that which is square. Tis hyperbolic, of- cious, hilarious autobiography fnally tells the story of the Orange Alternative in a way that does the movement justice. Our unreli- able narrator in the story, our hero, is as a writer as he was as a revo- lutionary: a shifting shape-changing trickster who recognizes the power of humour. Te Trickster archetype appears in the indigenous mythology of nearly all cultures. Characters like the Raven (Native American) use mimicry, mockery, and mental judo to confound, bamboozle and ultimately defeat much larger, more powerful op- ponents. Our Major Waldemar Fydrych, of whom you are about to read, carries the torch in a pantheon of unreliable characters VI | Lives of the Orange Men that autocracy has worked hard to forget. Loki, Prometheus, the Raven, Eshu, Winnebago, Coyote. Hundreds more. Fydrych takes a contemporary place in an old profession: changing the course of history with humour. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that mischief is a historical force. Te feudal order, he suggested, wasn’t overturned by Enlightenment thought and gunpowder, but by subversive humour. Peasants turned power relations upside down in medieval carnivals, ridicul- ing kings and princes in performances that refected “a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous paro- dies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings.” Tis is the antidote to serious. Bakhtin was denied his doctorate degree, and nobody called him a historian, in- stead bestowing upon him the much more namby-pamby, toothless title “literary critic.” Alas, he died before Major Waldemar Fydrych ascended, but perhaps he would have been proud of Major: he has become part of a lineage of modern revolutionaries who vindicate Bakhtin’s reading of history. Most recently we have the case of the Arab Spring. In the English-language press, Egypt’s 2011 uprising largely became a serious story about technology triumphing over a despot. Tat view of history is a hoax (Twitter and Facebook had large, very well-funded PR departments opportunistically propagating it). Missing, for the most part, from the media’s capitalist portrait of contemporary revolution was the oldest and most subversive po- litical tool there is: humour. Tere were people holding joke plac- ards, giving mock speeches as those in power, and wearing bread on their heads in an act of silly defance. Nonetheless, we must read between the lines of the established press, we must dig deep to reveal the full poetry of social movements like it, and the laughtiv- ism that often acts as a spark in the tinderbox of action, but risks burial under the massive heaps of media spun by the PR facks of so-called “social media” corporations. Te steady stream of comedy fowing throughout Tahrir Square built community and solidarity for those resisting on the ground, not just in cyberspace as an il- lusion for people thousands of kilometres away. Which brings us back to the book you are about to read. Lives of the Orange Men is a timely historical reconstruction of the Orange Alternative, especially for a world outside Poland Foreword | VII that remembers a singular resistance that was called “Solidarity”; a singular resistance that appeared on the cover of the New York Times as moustachioed, always seriously angry men with a set of clearly defned demands putting their asses on the line in tra- ditional, humourless, black and white defance. Tat’s not the whole story. Tere are many more shades to this tale. Without the tricksters – and especially without the dwarves – the serious men lack the lustre to become an alternative to the oppression of the dominant system. Read on, and laugh on, as you glean lessons for your own revolutions. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, the Yes Men. editor’s introduction This is the first history in English to focus exclusively on the Orange Alternative. It difers from the frst Polish edition in that it has been extensively edited in collaboration with the author for its general readability and length; but also for the understand- ing of a Western audience. It includes extended footnotes, a new timeline of the movement’s happenings and an appendix of trans- lations of the Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism and each issue of the Orange Alternative. It also includes the introduction to the frst Polish edition by Anne Applebaum, an eyewitness to some of their actions who covered the Orange Alternative in her frst article writ- ten from Poland for the international press. Little has been written in English on the Orange Alternative,1 but they occupy a central position, not only in the culture of Polish resistance to state Communism, but in histories of social move- 1 Tough notable are the chapter on them in Padraic Kenney’s A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, the exhibition catalogue Happening Against Communism and the Orange Alternative Foundation’s self-published collec- tion of fyers and images, Orange Alternative. 2 | Lives of the Orange Men ment culture and activist-art more broadly.