Same horse, same rider

My comment on Authoritarianism and the politics of emotion by George F. Will in The Washington Post, 31 July 2020.

Anne Applebaum's narrative does not hold water.

In September 2011, when AA's husband Radek Sikorski was a government minister, the authorities launched a very intense and vicious campaign against our family. 

We have been targeted for years, but earlier provocations, although harmful, were not entirely successful. This time they decided to launch a very intense operation aimed initially at my wife Malgorzata Gluchowska, a pianist and piano teacher in the State School of Music in Zielona Góra in Poland. We monitored the operation's progress and recorded its details in our letters to the authorities. This was state-sponsored lawlessness in full throttle.

We wrote many letters to the country's top authorities. We pointed out numerous violations of law and our basic human rights. The government protected the immediate perpetrators and the associated lawlessness. In other words, the state and the criminal organisation is one and the same entity in Poland.

Eventually the authorities decided to remove us from our jobs. I was an associate professor of physics at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. We were both fired at the end of 2015. In case of my wife they manufactured fake medical statement, claiming that she suffered from unspecified 'delusions'. The best piano teacher of the school was declared by the authorities unfit for work. A typical Communist method.

It was not a question of 'if' but 'how' we were to be liquidated. I was the only faculty member at the University's Department of Physics with a western PhD (University of Florida 1995).

In reality, the lawlessness of the state has been invariant under the so-called 'transition to democracy' and is invariant under the change of governments. The only superficial difference is the choreography of the political dressage. However, it is the same horse and the same rider in the saddle.

@LechSBorkowski

https://lsborkowski.com/pol/

The twilight of reason

My comment on Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum review — the historian takes aim at political elites who have succumbed to the lure of populism by Trevor Philips in The Sunday Times, 19 July 2020.

AA's narrative is made-up. The roles of democrats are played by Communists, their subordinates and their children. The biggest of them all in Poland is Adam Michnik, whose parents were hard core Communists. His father was a Soviet agent, acting on behalf of Stalin's Soviet Union against the Polish state. Michnik was cast in the role of a democratic 'dissident' of the Communist regime as part of the general strategy of managed changes of the outward appearance of the dictatorship.

The point is that there was no democratic transition in Poland in 1989-90. It was a velvet transition from above-the-line dictatorship to below-the-line dictatorship.

The first allegedly democratic PM of Poland in 1989 was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a former three-time member of the Communist 'Parliament'. His best election result was 98.92 percent of the vote in 1969. Not bad at all.

The same goes for Hanna Suchocka, another 'non-Communist' PM in the 1990s, an earlier member of the Communist 'Parliament'. 

Some other post-1990 PMs:

Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Communist Party Member

Leszek Miller, Communist Party member

Marek Belka, Communist Party member

Ewa Kopacz, PM during 2014-2015, was a member of PSL in the 1980s, a Communist-satellite party fully controlled by the Communists

@LechSBorkowski

https://lsborkowski.com/

Iceman comes alive

Believing that Russia and indeed other East European countries suddenly returned to what they have been before Communism, is like believing that the body of Oetzi the Iceman found in the Oetztal Alps in 1991 suddenly came back to life.

Lubov Chernukhin: Quiet Russian’s £1.7m makes her top female Tory donor

Russia fabricated story about a cult

Comment on The Times article Fears of ‘new Waco’ as tsarist cult seizes Russian convent by Marc Bennetts, 19 June 2020.

This is a fabricated story, where the conflict is fake.
Similar spectacle was staged in Poland in 2007, when nuns locked themselves up in a convent in a Roman Catholic convent in Kazimierz Dolny. It was the story of a religious sect, which was established in this convent. There was also a 'rebel priest' among them. There was a threat of violence. There was a standoff etc. The Catholic church in Poland and the Orthodox Russia lost their autonomy very soon after the onset of the Communist rule. On 15 October 2004, the Polish pope John Paul II celebrated the 26 anniversary of his pontificate in the Vatican with the concert of the Red Army Choir. The concert was televised to Italy and Russia.

David Cannadine reevaluates Anthony Blunt's case. No victims

I was surprised to hear a reevaluation of the Anthony Blunt's case.

Couple of days ago BBC Radio 4 aired a podcast on Anthony Blunt, in which David Cannadine, the current President of the British Academy, reconsiders Blunt's case of spying for the Soviet Union and the resulting social and political consequences. Interestingly, no one asks the question of Blunt's moral responsibility towards victims of the repugnant, genocidal Communist dictatorship.

Quote from the program's web page: "David Cannadine speaks to many of Blunt’s former students and those directly involved in the raw and personal clash of ideals over Blunt's position, some of whom remained sympathetic to him as a great intellectual and great teacher, and saw themselves as defenders of intellectual liberty against a political witch-hunt."

Look ma, no victims! Communism presented as an intellectual exercise without mass murder, torture, expulsions, evictions.

As it happens, my family, including myself personally have been deeply affected by Communist persecution. As a result, I am working at a London's greengrocer's, after being fired from a university in Poland. I may be the only Physics PhD (University of Florida 1995) in that role anywhere in the world today.

Angela's bit of a spectacle

My brief comment on The Times article Merkel anger over Russian hacking by Oliver Moody, 14 May 2020.

Germany as a whole is in no position to stand up to Russia, and even more so with comrade Angela Merkel, former member of the youth wing of the East German Communist party Freie Deutsche Jugend, as a chancellor. Much ado about nothing. A bit of a spectacle to give Angela the chance to pretend she is hurt.