BTL dictatorship

This text is part of a letter dated 6 June 2013. The last two paragraphs were already posted earlier in this blog.

6 June 2013

[...]
The communist totalitarian state has transformed itself. The perestroika was hugely successful. The power remained in the same hands. New lies and new tricks were invented. You do not have to bring out the tanks onto the streets in order to maintain the grip on power. After years of brutal murders, expulsion, repression and intimidation, you only need to keep an eye on those few individuals who become outspoken and dare to criticize the current regime. These days you do not have to shoot them in the back of the head somewhere in the pine forest in the wee hours of the morning. [...]

These days careers of select individuals in Poland are killed at will, one by one, on fabricated, absurd charges. The communists knew perfectly well that you can't go on forever killing people physically. They gradually changed their tactics. Instead of killing the body they focused on killing the mind and the soul. The advanced knowledge of the social sciences was employed for the sole purpose of murdering the soul and murdering the social dimension of a person. Psychology became operational psychology. The key elements to the successful murder of the social being are the isolation of the victim and the participation of as many perpetrators as possible. This is the true meaning of Solidarity in Poland. It is the solidarity of the oppressors against an individual. All these methods inherited by the current Polish junta are widely used in Poland today. Psychological terror against any bright and brave individual standing up for dignity and honor is the main tool of the regime.

We are faced with a new type of dictatorship. We have multi-party elections in Poland, we have the parliament, different newspapers and tv channels, facebooks and twitters, and often the same tv series as people watch all over the world. However the ugly minds adapted to all that and are taking full advantage of the technological progress. They are running the BTL dictatorship, i.e. dictatorship "below-the-line". The chain of command is hidden from view. The tyranny relies on many seemingly independent acts committed by a large number of perpetrators in different institutions. It is the solidarity of the junta against the rest of us. The perpetrators of the junta are rewarded with money, prizes, careers, and social status.

The so-called velvet revolution of the 1989-90 was a fraud. This was merely a transformation of the brutal regime into a new form. A form that was better adapted to a new reality. This new form of dictatorship imitates the language of mature democracies. It imitates their rhetoric. It imitates some democratic processes. But it is no more than an exercise in deception. Another act in the same theatrical play, where public rituals are supposed to trick people into believing that beneath the rituals there is a genuine democratic content. However beneath a thin veil of democratic rituals is the same stalinist iron fist. Wladyslaw Gomulka, the First Secretary of the communist party declared in his Moscow speech on 18 June 1945, "We will never relinquish the power that we once won" ("Raz zdobytej władzy nie oddamy nigdy"). And it is this quote that perfectly describes the post-1990 Poland. Gomulka's followers kept his promise. The much-publicized Lech Walesa's line "We, the People", opening his speech to the American Congress in 1991 was a lie. He should have said "We, the Junta".

The Polish communist junta seemed to give up power in a negotiated settlement with the representatives of the so-called democratic opposition in 1989. Much has been written about the apparent rise of the civil society in the communist countries and how it brought about the regime change. The course of events over the next twenty four years proved beyond any doubt that the 1989 settlement was merely a trick enabling the communists and their allies to remain in control and to continue occupying all positions of power. The "democratic opposition" was neither opposition nor was it democratic. It was a device created by the communist dictatorship in order to legitimize the departure from the dull, old-style regime and mask the transition to a new, more advanced form of tyranny.