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.
