The activity of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association
was the subject of a special workshop held at the prestigious
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
The two-day workshop took place on 14-15 September
2019 under the title ‘The People vs Extremism & Populist
Radical Right in Europe: Impact and Experiences of European Civil
Society Networks’. It focused on the experiences of ‘NEVER AGAIN’
in the field of international cooperation against racism, hate speech
and hate crime. The session was conducted by Rafal Pankowski,
co-founder of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association and sociology
professor at Warsaw’s Collegium Civitas who has been a visiting
lecturer at Chulalongkorn University in 2018 and 2019. The workshop
was attended by several dozen participants from Thailand and other
countries including Bangladesh, China, and France.
Chulalongkorn University was established in 1917
and its name commemorates king Chulalongkorn (Rama V), the monarch of
Siam (Thailand) who abolished slavery. It is ranked among the best
universities in Southeast Asia.
The workshop is one among numerous activities
recently undertaken by the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association together
with its friends and partners in Asia. On 25-30 August, Rafal
Pankowski participated in the Flying University of Transnational
Humanities under the title ‘The Holocaust meets the post-colonial
in the global memory space’ held at Sonong University in Seoul,
South Korea. During a heated debate at that international forum, the
‘NEVER AGAIN’ representative defended the importance of genocide
memory as a cognitive and discursive tool and point of reference in
the current-day struggles for moral, social and political progress.
On 2 September, Pankowski delivered a lecture entitled ‘Nationalist
populism in Central Europe: the case of Poland’ at the University
of Tokyo, Japan. The model of Polish-German reconciliation was
mentioned by several participants as a possible inspiration for the
Korean-Japanese relationship.
On 28-30 August, Natalia Sineaeva represented
‘NEVER AGAIN’ at the international conference on ‘Genocide,
Memory and Peace’ organized by UNESCO at the Tuol Sleng Genocide
Museum (the former Khmer Rouge prison and extermination centre) in
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. On 17-20 September, she shared the experiences
of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association during the Informal Training
Seminar on ‘Human Rights and Prevention of Violent Extremism’
hosted by the Asia-Europe Foundation in New Delhi, India.
Meanwhile in Poland, the ‘NEVER AGAIN’
Association has been a partner of a new exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in Warsaw entitled ‘Never Again. Art Against War and
Fascism in the 20th and 21st Centuries’. The exhibition provoked
another attack against ‘NEVER AGAIN’ on the Polish
(state-controlled) television which called it ‘stupid propaganda’.
Polish state TV has attacked ‘NEVER AGAIN’ already several times
this year. The Polish Human Rights Commissioner (Ombudsman) Adam
Bodnar protested against the defamation. In a formal letter to the
National Council on Radio and Television, the Ombudsman wrote the
attacks had ‘no substance’ and they ‘could be considered an
attempt to discredit (...) actions against racism and antisemitism in
Poland. The statements (...) are problematic in the light of the
mission of the public media and they trivialize the danger of such
harmful phenomena as hate speech and antisemitism.’
The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is an
independent organization established in Warsaw in 1996. ‘NEVER
AGAIN’ has campaigned against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia,
for peace, intercultural dialogue and human rights both in Poland and
internationally.
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