After a long hiatus, Max Denken returns with a film review that is much more than a review: he has a family connection with the area of Poland that abuts the border with Belarus and is featured in the movie.

Brown Border

by Max Denken

The movie

Tired and jet-lagged upon arrival in Warsaw, I bide the daytime hours. A walking distance from my hotel, a movie theater is playing Green Border, the new film by Polish émigré film director Agnieszka Holland.

America’s most prominent film school and a stab at a Hollywood career are as long behind me as are Holland’s days at the FAMU film school in Prague. I once introduced to a Los Angeles audience Krzysztof Zanussi, the Polish film director with whom, as his assistant director, Holland began her career, but my paths never crossed hers nor did my interests in film or life run parallel. Still, I loved her children’s film The Secret Garden (1993) and, as an animal lover, could identify with her revulsion at a driven hunt’s wholesale slaughter of wildlife in Spoor (2017). I drag myself out of the hotel and go to see Green Border, Holland’s film that had just had its premiere screening at the 80th Venice Film Festival in September, 2023.

What I proceed to endure for two and a half interminable hours is an agitprop salad similar in intent but far below the artistic level of such famous purveyors of film propaganda as Sergei Eisenstein for the Bolsheviks and Leni Riefenstahl for Hitler. There is no story with real human characters in the traditional narrative sense but a weepy outburst about numinous Syrian, Afghan, and African refugees trying to invade Poland’s via its border from Belarus and being brutally repulsed.

The New York Film Festival synopsized the film as, “A Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden. But, like so many lost souls, they end up caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game.”

The reality background to Holland’s invention is that in July, 2021, Alexandr Lukashenko, the dictator leader of Belarus, threatened to “flood” the European Union with drugs and migrants and proceeded with this scheme of hybrid warfare. Belarussian agencies in tandem with some Middle Eastern airlines fraudulently promoted easy entry into the EU’s territory and arranged for the delivery of migrants to the Polish-Belarus border. It was an inhumane, cynical ploy probably ordered by Lukashenko’s ally in the Kremlin to either force a stream of undesirables onto Russia’s foe, Poland, or to make Poland look bad if it refused to grant them passage.

A flood of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Congolese, Cameroonians, and Sudanese followed to the forested border. By November 2021, Poland’s border guard had intercepted over 32,000 migrants’ attempts to invade Poland. Having defied the EU’s order to take in a share of Angela Merkel’s invitees since 2015, Poland’s PiS government, to its credit, was not going to yield to this Putin/Lukashenko ploy, either.

And that evidently unleashed in Ms. Holland — daughter of a Polish-Jewish high communist official and notorious European “progressive” — her own flood: that of the maternal bonding female hormone oxytocin. The same one that a group of German — what else — scientists stated in their 2017 paper “Oxytocin-enforced norm compliance reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection “ would reduce “xenophobic outgroup rejection” if administered to all those racist white people who don’t want half a billion African and Middle Eastern Muslim refugees in Europe and North America.

Holland’s migrants are “refugees” and “people like us” — middle class in their countries, handy with English and cellphones, and with means sufficient to have paid the stiff costs of this passage. In reality, they are not like us.

Holland’s Syrian “refugees” are not the stabbers of children in a playground in Annecy or hateful attackers of Jews in Vienna. They are not the Syrian refugees who just in 12 months of 2016/2017, set a homeless man on fire on Christmas in Berlin or, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” attacked and injured four people at a bus station in Lünen. They are not the Syrian refugee who murdered a pregnant woman with a machete and wounded two others at a bus station in Reutlingen.

They are not the Syrian “asylum seeker” who raped a 44-year-old mentally disabled woman in Soest. They are not the 27-year-old Syrian who stabbed and killed a Red Cross mental health counselor in Saarbrücken, or the one who tried to behead 64-year-old Ilona Fugmann who had offered him a job at her beauty salon in Herzberg.

They are not the Syrian “asylum seekers” who were filming and molesting underage girls at a swimming pool in Löbau or the ones who did so in Mariendorf, or the one who sexually assaulted a ten-year-old girl in Tübingen.

Holland’s Syrians are not the “migrant” who went on a “stabbing-spree” on board a train in Bavaria, or the one who attacked passengers on a bus from Berlin to Milan. They are not the “asylum seeker” who blew himself up next to a wine bar in Ansbach and wounded 15 people, or the one in Pittsburgh, who sought to blow up a church for Isis. Nor are they like Abdalfatah who sought refuge in Germany after murdering 36 people in Syria for the Jabhat al-Nusra jihadist group.

No, they are just a cute family with a genial grandpa, a well-married couple, and their nice boy, little girl, and a baby. Not even a Syrian “refugee” family where the father murders his wife because she irritated him, or murders his wife and two daughters and leaves them dead in a freezer.

Holland’s Afghan refugees in the film consist of one English-speaking, kind woman who “helped the Americans” during the Afghanistan war. In reality, Afghan rapefugees sow terror in the heart of Europe’s women. They rape and murder. Again and again, everywhere in Europe, solo and in groups, boasting of it on Facebook, the victim alternately an adult, girl, or boy.

Holland’s sole Afghan is not the 19-year-old Afghan “asylum seeker” who stabbed three people in Ravensburg, or the 41-year-old who murdered a five-year-old Russian boy and severely wounded his mother in Arnschwang, or the one whose sexual intercourse with a woman in Limerick included stabbing her to death in a “frenzied attack “. Nor is she portraying the Afghan migrant who murdered two people in Serbia and then one in Britain, or the one who stabbed seven people in Sweden. Just a kind, educated, Afghan woman mistreated by Polish goons-in-uniform.

Holland’s Africans are not the testosterone-filled, young primitives landing on Europe’s shores by the hundreds of thousands and terrorizing the local population, roasting cats, brandishing their penises or defecating in public, brawling and destroying property incessantly and everywhere. One ought to check out the @RadioGenoa account on X to see much evidence of what they are about. But for Holland they are just a couple of nice, well-behaved teens.

The border has a barbed wire fence. Those nice Syrians, Africans, and one nice lady from Afghanistan are trying repeatedly to breach that fence and each time are repulsed by pitiless, all-black (in character) goons serving as Poland’s Border Patrol. When on the staging side of the barbed wire fence, they are exploited and humiliated by even worse Belarussian goons-in-uniform, and then pushed through that fence into a country whose Border Patrol pushes them back.

They are hungry, thirsty, cold. Some are sick. But then, before Western progressives decided that reality is optional, the law of the Universe has always been that one suffers the consequences of one’s mistakes. Few mistakes can be as bad as to have traveled from faraway Asia and Africa to the Polish border in the belief that it will give way.

Eventually, some manage to get through the fence and, after more harrowing adventures like drowning in a swamp, are aided by a group of young Polish radicals, given food, medical treatment, and shelter and transportation deeper into Poland in the approving glow of the demiurge of this moral fantasy: Agnieszka Holland.

Holland portrays the enforcers of Poland’s territorial sovereignty as primitive cartoon villains, pitiless at the bottom, and fascist at the top. The bottom is the Polish Border Patrol that has no pity even for pregnant women. They toss one over the fence back onto Belarus soil and manhandle many others. Their officer shouts that the pitiful group of migrants mired between the barbed wire and the swamp are “not people” but bullets fired into the heart of Poland.

The only border guard portrayed with sympathetic shading is Jan, whose wife is pregnant and disapproving of his “brutal” occupation. Jan initially participates in the pushback actions but is gradually sickened by the required violence and softens to the point of pretending not to see “migrants” transported into Poland’s interior by another kind Pole.

At the top are the “fascists” — Poland’s slightly right-of-center PiS ruling party that has given the finger to the European Union’s demands for absorbing a “fair share” of the kind of “refugees” that Angela Merkel and the EU were importing by the millions before Lukashenko decided to give them more of their medicine.

Holland, along with most of Poland’s cultural elite, is an outspoken, leftist enemy of PiS — the party that has said No to invaders from alien cultures. She has gone so far into the swamp of “progressive” hysteria that one of her two more developed “good-guy” characters, Bogdan, tells his therapist that he cannot stand the “Nazis” marching in Warsaw under the protection of the “fascist” government — a lie so grotesque as to indicate the warped furniture in Ms. Holland’s brain. Bogdan confesses as well that because of those Polish “Nazis” and fascists he is impotent, cannot sleep, eat, or think.

Vitality returns to Bogdan’s so-dreary life with a loving family in a luxurious villa near Warsaw when he too engages in the “activist” effort. He and his wife and children host three young North-African migrants just smuggled in from the border, invite them to their dinner table, and so on. In a scene characteristic of the twisted minds of Holland and white progressives everywhere, Bogdan’s sons bond with the Africans by joining them in a French rap.

For the white rich kids, knowing French is normal. But what’s more telling is that they, Poles far removed from Africa, have adopted the black culture and they rap in French as expertly as their African guests do. In Poland.

It would never have occurred to Holland to write the scene in the opposite way, with the African guests making an effort to adapt to the culture of their hosts and singing with them a Polish song with the harmonies that are Europe’s culture heritage.

Julia is the other more developed “good guy” character. She is Bogdan’s psychologist and Zoom interlocutor. Moved by the plight of the migrants in the forest near her home, Julia turns from a bystander to a committed rescuer working with the younger activists to smuggle as many migrants into Poland as possible. Maja Ostaszewska, who plays Julia, is a well-known “progressive” and major pro-migrants activist in Poland.

The rest of the positive characters are the bleeding-heart Polish volunteers who help the migrant invaders and made it past the border fence. They are all unalloyed cartoon goodness just as the border guards and policemen who are the barrier against the invaders are the unalloyed evil.

I have written a book and several articles about the horrors that refugees, “refugees,” and migrants from Asian Muslim countries and Africa inflict on Europe. I saw this film while a true African invasion was landing on the beaches of Lampedusa. I am writing this in November, when that invasion is continuing while huge crowds of Muslim imports are marching and rioting all over Europe and the entire Anglosphere, waving black jihad flags, shouting “Death to the Jews,” and generally behaving in ways not seen since the Kristallnacht. I am appalled at Holland’s specious propaganda masquerading as a film drama, her smearing of the one, rare state sane enough to have resisted to rush to self-obliteration, her libelous depiction of the Polish Border Patrol.

I am therefore renaming Green Border as Brown Border. The brown adjective comes from my long-ago Hollywood mentor, an Irish curmudgeon who had elbowed his way to a position of influence in that Jewish-founded-and-dominated industry. Art had long-ago mastered Yiddish, so he taught me some. When it came to a lousy film, hackneyed book, or a revolting painting, he invariably called it dreck. When it came to a lousy human being, he reverted to his native Irish brogue: shite.

Whether dreck or shite, it’s the same color. Green Border is not a work of art but a lying, hysterical outpouring of agitprop by a female raised in a privileged communist home, favoring her ideology over reality, and attacking a polity that, since 1989, no longer adheres to diktats of the Comintern. It’s par for the course that the World Socialist Website attacked Holland’s detractors in a headline reading “The Polish far-right’s vicious campaign against Agnieszka Holland’s film ‘The Green Border’ replete with ‘ antisemitic and fascistic undertones against the film’.”

The reality

Something needs to be said about those “bullets into the heart of Poland” — words that Holland put in the mouth of the Border Guard’s commander, no doubt to imply that he is the epitome of evil. In reality, those words are appropriate and would have been even if the border-busting migrants consisted mostly of women, children and kind men — which they didn’t.

One now has ample opportunities to see what happens to countries that had a more tenderhearted approach to Muslim refugees and “refugees.” Here is Berlin and here is London. Or New York, or Dearborn, or a hundred other cities in the pathologically altruist West. A European or Europeans-founded country signs its death warrant even if taking in African and Asian Muslim women and children, let along young, military-age men who are the great majority of the invaders.

That death is often pegged at the level of more than 30% share of Muslims in the population — and countries like Sweden and Germany are projected to reach that level by 2050. However, since Whites, and Whites alone have been stripped of their ethnic survival instinct by massive brainwashing of the sort that Ms. Holland dishes out in Green Border, far less than 30% is sufficient.

Four percent of Muslims in Great Britain are sufficient to see Muslim imports as mayors of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, and Rochdale. All UK schools serve halal meat, cross buns are banned because of the “offensive” cross, and many schools have foot baths installed at great expense so that Muslims students can pray.

Hundreds of thousands of British girls were being “groomed” for 15 years by “Asian” men with all complaints to police, social workers, etc. useless because of fear of being accused of “racism.” There are over 3,000 mosques, over 130 Sharia courts, and some statistics show that 63% of Muslim men and 78% of women don’t work and live off lavish benefits and free housing often in excess of what legacy Britons can get. There is much more.

Such a picture of a small, imported Muslim and African minority throwing a whole country into an orbit of madness, fear, and self-obliteration can be constructed for every European country except those situated in what I called in my book “The Camp of the Sane,” with Poland and Hungary paramount. And it’s that sanity that infuriates Agnieszka Holland and her co-religionists in the church of Progressivism. Hence Holland’s motivational audio-visual presentation denouncing the self-preservation of a rare European country that has chosen to survive.

Fortuitously, I have come to Poland to visit a cousin who lives just a few miles from that segment of the border where the whole drama had played for real in 2021. It’s in Podlasie county, which is a living museum of what Poland used to be. The houses are wooden and very old. The kitchens have tiled, wood-burning stoves just like they did 100 years ago. The last primeval European forest is here too, with flora and fauna extinct elsewhere.

But the main museum piece is the demographics. There are Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusians here; the Jews are missing but only because the Germans murdered them all in the 1940s. Those four constituted the bulk of the population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that ended in 1795 — but not here.

And then there are the Tatars. Muslims in a Catholic country often accused of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and so on. But they are not the Muslims “enriching” and tearing apart Germany, UK, Sweden, and other countries doing away with themselves. Descendants of renowned cavalry units that switched their loyalty to Poland during the reign of King Jan III Sobieski, they have been living in several all-Tatar villages in Podlasie since 1674 and fielding their units in defense of Poland ever since.

My cousin knows everyone here. She takes me to visit her friend, the very Border Patrol officer, now retired, who was in charge of this sector of the border. We drive to Sokółka, a central town in this region, population about 18,000.

Jan greets me with the traditional kiss on both cheeks, and his wife Marta plies us with home-made delicacies. And their house is a museum piece in museum land.

I tell Jan about Green Border that I had just seen. It’s not playing here in the remote countryside yet, but he had read about it in all the newspapers and on the Internet.

“It’s all lies,” he says.

“So what happened at the border here?” I ask.

“They did not come here as refugees requesting asylum,” Jan says. “If they had, all they had to do was to show up at the border crossing in Kuźnica, fill out the appropriate form, and then we would take them to a refugee processing center. They would live there while their petition was under review and they would be checked for Covid and other diseases. Instead, they showed up at the border fence, trying to force it. They were not interested in an asylum in Poland but in forcing their passage through Poland to countries west of us with higher welfare benefits.”

He looks at me to let that sink: “Not a single person asked for asylum.”

“Were there really so many women, children, old people like the movie shows?”

“In July and August we saw families with women and children. After that it was all young, aggressive men. The proportion was the inverse of what the film shows: not 95% families, women and children and 5% young, single men, but 95% young, single men and 5% women and children. “

“I was fearing for his life every day,” Marta says, her voice quivering. “They were throwing large rocks at our men that could have killed them. He came home one night with a bleeding gash on his forehead.”

“At the beginning,” Jan says, “we did not have shields. And those were not just rocks — there were large pieces of concrete with rebar in them, truly lethal weapons that must have been supplied by the Belarusians. They also used slings. And they would come to the wire and scream at us, ‘Polish soldier, I kill you.’“

“It was worst on November 21, 2021,” he adds. “That was a war zone, but we were not allowed to respond in kind.”

“I saw some of the border guards here in Sokółka and on the road close to the border,” I say. “They are young men. It must have been hard for them to retain their composure under such a barrage, to not draw their weapons and fire at their attackers.”

“I am proud of them,” Jan says, “we had strict orders not to use our weapons and not a single men disobeyed, no matter how hard it was for some hotheads to retain their cool under attack.”

“What about medical emergencies? The film hints that those were not tended to.”

“We had ambulances here,” Jan says, “and took the sick to the hospital in Sokółka. We discovered that some were pretending to be sick, just saw the ambulance as a way of getting inside Poland.”

Later I find a precise number: from the start of the migrants’ pressure on the border zone, border guards have called medical ambulances 830 times.

Beyond the brown border

Agnieszka Holland, already president of the European Film Academy, is now the hero of the West’s cultural elite. At the inaugural showing of her film at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Holland received the Special Jury Prize and a standing ovation. The festival’s write-up states with the typical pathological altruism of the white liberal that the film “opens our eyes, speaks to the heart, and challenges us to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people.”

Speaking to the heart is one thing, but speaking to the heart by manufacturing a one-sided propaganda tale out of complex reality is another.

Green Border received two long, standing ovations at the October 4, 2023, screening at the New York Film Festival. The festival’s website referred to its depiction of a “contemporary global humanitarian crisis.” The film won first prizes at the film festivals of Chicago, Valladolid (Spain) and La Roche (France).

The Standard called the film “astounding” and opined that “Holland reveals the biggest killers of all: not just the Taliban in Afghanistan or Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but the governments and policy makers of Belarus, Poland and the EU, whose heinous treatment of asylum-seekers is depicted so graphically here.”

While there are no good words for Lukashenko’s role in this sorry chapter, to brand as “heinous” EU’s nearly nonexistent will to keep “refugees” out, or even PiS-governed Poland’s much stronger will, is a grotesque farce.

The film critic Philip De Semlyen gave the film five stars and wrote in Time Out, “Green Border leaves us with a slight chink of optimism. Holland is at pains to show Poland’s young people rejecting the poison of state media and the cruelty of their government to embrace a more human approach to the migrant crisis.”

Apart from the maximum three, not five, stars that Green Border merits for its film craftsmanship, Semlyen’s and the whole cultural elite’s agitation for “migrants” is the talk of imbeciles. It would be hard though to surpass the reality-is-optional craziness of Ms. Holland herself. “It [sic] a forbidden zone, a zone of fear, and a zone of the dead,” she said. “The situation is so dangerous for the future of Europe because if we accept this violence as a response to the political problems, if we forget the rights of the human beings just because they are ‘illegal’ or Black or whatever, the next step [will be] to kill them.”

With such fools as custodians of Europe’s and United States’ culture, it’s not for nothing that Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi said in 2006 that “ Islam Will Conquer Europe Without Firing a Shot” and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in 2017, “Our minarets are our bayonets, our domes are our helmets, our mosques are our barracks.”

There was nothing exceptional about these statements. Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, Chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, said that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor. Saudi Sheik Al Arifi said, “ We Will Control the Land of the Vatican.” And Mohamed Akram, writing for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, advised already in 1987: “The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.”

The European Union’s, America’s and Canada’s progressive regimes are pushing Muslim and African migrants on their peoples. For the media’s consumption, King Charles recently told the fawning Sir Michael Palin he wants refugees to “feel more welcome.” But Viktor Orbán, the one great leader in Europe now, tweeted recently his outrage at Europe’s demise forced by its brainwashed ruling elite:

A bureaucratic terrorist attack against free speech: the European Parliament lifted the immunity of four PiS MEP’s for speaking out against illegal migration. The beginning of the end… Good morning, Europe!

In the United States, multiple voices ranging from the Lutheran Refugee Service to Senator Durbin and House members Pramila Jayapal and Jane Schakowsky in their petition to the White Hose are clamoring for giving one million Palestinians asylum in the United States. Meanwhile, Egypt has vowed to place its army at the Rafah crossing so that not one Palestinian will cross into Egypt, and Jordan said No as well.

Not a single Muslim country has offered to take in Palestinian refugees displaced in Gaza now or ever since 1948. Muslim Pakistan has started bulldozing refugee camps as they expel 1.7 million Muslim Afghan refugees. Do they know something that our peoples have been brainwashed not to know?

The entire community of European and Europeans-founded countries except those saved from the horrible brain sickness by the Iron Curtain is now in dreck territory beyond the brown border, conditioned for 60 years by lying Neo-Marxist, Gramscian films, books, plays, TV programs, fake news, fake advertisers, fake education, and fake leaders.

The swamp of dreck from which our people have swallowed and inhaled enough to have lost their minds is so vast that Congresswoman Schakowsky, who wants to bring a million Jew-hating Palestinians to the U.S., and Agnieszka Holland, who pillories Poland for keeping out “migrants” from the worlds’ most anti-Semitic culture, are both Jewish. Meanwhile, Copenhagen’s Imam Mundhir Abdallah — that’s Copenhagen, Denmark — called in 2017 for jihad to invade and conquer Europe. He also said that the Jews’ “filth, and their vileness, reflect [their] immutable nature.”

Poor Shani Louk — kidnapped by Palestinians on October 7, ultimately decapitated, her naked body paraded triumphantly on the streets of Gaza — had stewed so long in progressive dreck during her childhood within the hip-progressive Jewish community of Portland, Oregon and adulthood in Angela Merkel’s Germany that she would come to dance seductively at a rave party for love and freedom held five kilometers from an enclave of stone-killer Palestinians with hate-filled minds formed in the 7^th century.

Who is responsible for her death: the savages of Gaza or the tender-minded “progressives” who had put blinkers on her eyes concerning Palestinians’ nature, Islam’s true face, and the evil that’s out there in the world?

Take Western “gays.” Here is how they flaunt their “progressive” creed:

And here is the reality. In a video. And in a cartoon passed around in the social media:

There are no plaintive “Why can’t we all get along” bumper-stickers in any Muslim country in the world. There are no Africans kissing the feet of Whites for having rescued them from slavery and poverty first in Africa and then in America, but there are lots of Whites kissing black feet in apology for slavery. It’s all because of the cultural dreck that pounded 330,000 U.S. African slaves into the heads of all Americans, but omitted to tell them that ten million African slaves were shipped each to Central/South America and the lands of Araby, and at least 3.2 million white slaves were taken and sold in the same period by Muslim Berbers, Turks, and Tatars.

It’s high time for film criticism and all evaluations of contemporary Western art to start isolating and removing the brown sediment.

Max Denken was well on his way to PhDs in Economics and Political Science until he discovered that the former was based on quantifying wildly fanciful assumptions and the latter was much closer to Scientology than to Science. Born Central European, he has become Marginal American: wrong race, wrong gender, wrong sexual orientation, wrong religion, wrong thoughts. For his previous essays, see the Max Denken Archives.