What Bush gave Kaczynski

President Lech Kaczynski came out of his meeting with George Bush at the White House, Monday, sounding much more certain that the anti-missile system is coming to northern Poland.

“It’s a forgone conclusion,” Kaczynski said standing next to a grinning Bush. Only the details, technical details, need to be cleared up.

A few weeks ago it emerged from anguished Polish spokesmen that the talks were not going as well as expected. There were sticking points. But now things seem to have moved forward considerably. So what changed during the pow-wow in the Oval Office?

Kaczynski has apparently been learning some English. Or so we are told. But what’s in his specially produced US visit phrase book, apart from “Hi”, and “I’ll have the cheese burger, just like my buddy George, please.”?

Maybe the phrase book – a slim volume - was filled with a couple of other phrases.

“Visa waver program, please” …and …”More money for the defense budget…..”…..and, “When can we get the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq, please?”….

But it looks like it is possible that Bush has offered something different. Something more concrete.

Former PiS defense minister Radek Sikorski was on Polish Radio this morning when he said:

“It’s obvious that [the US] has offered them [PiS] something. I think they have given them Patriot Missiles.”

Patriot missiles? They are a tracking missile for anti-ballistic defense. Most varieties of the patriot appear to have a range of 70 kilometers.

They were used in the Gulf wars against Saddam's Skud missiles, and South Korea has them as protection against any missiles whistling over the border from North Korea.

So they are perfect, from Poland's perspective, for hitting missiles coming from a source near one’s own border.

Perfect for fending off any missiles coming from….maybe Russia?

So while the whole anti-missile system is said by Washington and Warsaw to be against ‘rogue’ states, a Poland armed with patriots would feel a little securer against threats from Moscow.

It’s just a theory.

The name ‘Patriot’, by the way, is an acronym for Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept Of Target.

There is also another bacronym: Protection Against Threats, Real, Imagined, Or Theorized.

More?
Poll: 55 percent of Poles oppose hosting U.S. missile defense base

Foxy Lepper and Giertych to form new party

It’s going to be called LiS – ‘lis’ is Polish for fox.

Stop sniggering…it’s true – Andrzej Lepper’s Samoobrona (Self defense) party and Roman Giertych’s Christian nationalist Liga Polskich Rodzin (League of Polish Families) will unite. Take the first letter of Samoobrona and the first letter from Liga, add an ‘i’ (and) and you get LiS.

When asked which of them would be the leader of LiS, Lepper said that it would probably be a joint leadership: “Me - balanced, calm and serious. Vice premier Giertych - eloquent, intelligent, witty.”

One possible election slogan for the new LiS party, says Lepper, could be: ‘Strong as a lion, cunning as a fox’.

Is this man on drugs?

But why and how, I hear you cry, would an ex-Stalinist like Lepper (previously a member of the old Polish communist party) and an uber-Catholic nationalist like Giertych get together and form a party? What have they in common, ideologically?

Well, not much, really. Policy-wise though, they both want to de-privatize much of what was sold off after 1989. They both want to limit foreign influence and renegotiate Poland’s membership of the EU. But that’s just about it.

What they have most in common, of course, is that both their parties have little support left in the country after a year and a half in the coalition government with PiS, and if an election was held now they would be left with no members of parliament at all.

Hence the emergence of LiS – the cunning fox. Lepper thinks that if they stand together they could get, ‘around 17 percent of the vote…’.

I think that is more than wishful thinking. I think voters will see it for what it is: the naked opportunism of two desperate men. LPR voters, what’s left of them, won’t stomach voting for Lepper, who has just been thrown out of government on suspicion of being involved in a corrupt land deal. And there are lots of other Christian nationalists to vote for that are outside Giertych’s party – like Marek Jurek’s PiS splinter group, for instance.

This unbelievable new alliance – LiS – looks less like a cunning fox, and more like a dumb, mangy old mongrel.

Krzysztof Bosak – more popular with gays than voters

Bosak, Christian nationalist and youngest member of the Polish parliament, is a Polish gay icon.

I was just watching TVN Style cable channel and there was an interview with Polish lawmaker and former head of ultra Catholic All Polish Youth, Krzysztof Bosak.

Mr Bosak has, what some refer to as, rather homophobic views, as does his party, League of Polish Families. He was part of what turned out to be a violent protest against gays marching in Krakow last year. As reported by the UK Guardian:

Waving a red-and-white Polish flag at the Krakow march with fellow protesters from the Catholic Mlodziez Wszechpolska youth group, Krzysztof Bosak said: "Violence is bad but there is no way you can protest against this abnormality without violence."

The interviewer on the program asked him how many voters voted for him in the last election.

“I think it was around three and a half thousand,”, he said (under a PR list system it is possible to get elected to a national parliament with very low number of votes).

The host of the program then said:

“But on a recent gaylife.pl poll for Poland’s greatest ‘Christian nationalist gay icon’ you got 14,000 votes…”

Bosak was understandably slightly disorientated by this.

It means, of course, that 11,000 more people voted for him as a gay icon than they did to represent voters in the Polish parliament.

Priceless….

By the way, listen to an ‘interesting’ interview with Bosak in English here.

Beatroot reviewed in Warsaw magazine

It’s in an article about ‘Poland’s best English language blogs’ in the July edition of the English language version of WiK, from Wprost magazine publishers.

It says:

Writing 5/5
“A sarcastic commentary on the comical antics of Poland’s Chaplinesque government, beatroot writes clearly, concisely, and with plenty of bite. The blog is a great source of information….[and is] updated every other day, is well laid out, and has a vitriolic fanbase, whose comments are often as entertaining as the blog.”

How sweet. See a scan of the first page of the article here via Boo’s blog.

But there is a mistake in the article which I just want to clear up. In a review of the old p3 blog, which I and others used to write for, it says that:

“[Despite] being an all star team on the keyboard….the band seems to have had a Spice -Girl-sized falling out, with several – such as Beatroot and Boo – trying their hand at a solo career.’

Though on a bad day I do have a passing resemblance to a combination of Scary and Ginger Spice (although some call me Old Spice) this is not historically accurate. In fact, p3 did not split up over musical differences, of course, to pursue solo careers. It was the other way round. The p3 collective were all functioning bloggers concentrating on our own blogs when we decided to get together and do a collective blog.

So, no: we didn’t have a ‘spice-girl-sized’ fall out. It was more like the gathering of a supergroup – like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young….or even The Travelling Wilbury's...

Now, being a vain kind of root veg, I had better go out and buy a copy of WiK.

Poland is in the hands of Satan!

Over 330 exorcists from 29 countries around the world have arrived in Czestochowa for their annual behind-closed-doors meeting to discuss new ways of fighting Satan.

And what better place to exorcise the devil himself but Czestochowa, the home to the shrine of the Black Madonna and annual destination for many pilgrims.

European exorcists meet once a year, usually in Italy or Germany. This is their second meeting in Czestochowa.

And what do you think that the exorcists are talking about today? Well, it must be that the Devil, the cloven-hoofed one, is running riot among Poland’s politicians. In the last few days we have seen His terrible work on this land:

How else can we explain Father Radio Maryja Rydzyk calling the First Lady of Poland a witch (see previous post)? Rydzyk himself said that the ‘Rydzyk Tapes’ were the ‘work of Satan’?

How else can we explain Andrzej Lepper getting booted out of the government?

How else can we explain the resignation of sports minister Tomasz Lipiec?

How else can we explain the vice president of the Polish Olympic Committee, Artur Pilka, being sacked from his post after being detained by police for purchasing a kilogram of cocaine over a three to four year period. He claims that the Columbian snow was for 'personal use only'. Sniff, sniff. The ex-sports minister was apparently in charge of getting rid of doping in Polish sport. I would hate to see the state of his nostrils!

So the hand of evil must be at work in this land. But what will the Polish voter do about all this, if they get the chance?

Will they do the exorcists' work for them? Or will they decide that it is better to stick with the devil you know, than the devil you don’t?

The Rydzyk Tapes

Stop press….Vice Premier and Agriculture Minister Andrzej Lepper kicked out of government on connection with corruption charges….election possible…. more here….


The First Lady of Poland is a witch and should be the subject of euthanasia, and the President of Poland is a conman surrendering to the Jewish lobby.

Not my words but those attributed to Radio Maryja director, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, when he was speaking to a group of students at The University of Social & Medial Culture in Toruń.

The story broke in the weekly Wprost today and since then the government has refused to comment until the tapes of Rydzyk’s remarks have been verified.

Rydzyk – who has been accused of running a radio station and publishing empire where the odd anti-Semitic remark is not unsual – has not denied he made the remarks. He is just saying that the article in Wprost is a ‘provocation’. thenews.pl reports:

According to Father Rydzyk - the media have blown the case out of proportion and he himself would never even think about "offending anyone ". In his opinion, it is "Satan who’s putting stumbling blocks into his way", but "we should not be manipulated and get divided". Director of Radio Maryja added: "Satan doesn’t like those who commune in Christ".

The Redemptoristine from Toruń also said on his radio station that "the truth should be spoken out, even though it upsets Satan. We cannot exist without that truth".

Well, indeed. TV has being playing small snippets of the ‘Rydzyk Tapes’ all day but we have still not seen the whole transcripts.

Perhaps it was just Rydzyk’s hilarious sense of humour? But whether it is or isn’t, the remarks put the government in a bit of a bind. The Kaczynski government has given Radio Maryja special access to news conferences in the past as it believed that the Rydzyk empire was the only news outlet not under the control of the dreaded uklad - the only news source that the Kaczynskis can trust.

If this scandal is as bad as it sounds then the government has one less source open to it.

Living it up at Polish nurses' 'Hilton Hotel' - politicians welcome!

Close to three weeks on strike and camped opposite the main government offices, the nurses refuse to give up.

The strike, for more pay (well, you couldn’t get much less than they get) has been supported by the general public. Thousands of trade unionists joined the protest Friday to show solidarity.

Nurses on hunger strike called off that particular type of protest this weekend, after a not too sympathetic response from the Polish government.

The government – or at least the health minister, Zbigniew Religa, has offered pay rises of up to 30 percent next year, but PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski has repeated, many times, that there is no money in the budget for substantial pay rises in 2007.

Conditions in what they are calling the ‘White City’ on Ujazdowski Av. opposite the prime minister’s office have deteriated over the weeks since the protest began. (They also call the place ‘Hotel Hilton’). Rain has bucketed down on the nurses from the beginning, turning, when we were their on Saturday, much of the ground around the tents to mud.

There are some portable toilets on the site and I saw nurses lining up for soup and bread rolls.

But sanitation is not good. We signed a book giving assistance to nurses who wanted a bath – our flat is only about half a kilometer down the road.

Strange, then, when the telephone went about 8 O’clock at night: it was a journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza wanting to know, ‘when we would be coming down to the ‘white city’? Apparently, someone at the union tent had shown journalists our names, telephone number etc.

I was slightly annoyed at that: we did not give our phone number so journalists from Gazeta Wyborcza could come and have a bath.

But if you are a nurse and you need a shower, then you are always welcome at Beatroot Mansions.

Next round of negotiations between unions and government is scheduled for this Tuesday. So nurses have at least two more nights to camp out under the stars.

Photos by traczka/beatroot productions

Live Earth on Polish TV

It’s the first time that extensive coverage on Polish TV has been given over to one of these global media events. But many Poles will be right to ask: what is the point of all this?

Thenews.pl reports:

The most extensive coverage of “Live Earth” will be on TVP Kultura. From 8.00 a.m. till late at night the channel will transmit “Live Earth” concerts from, among others, New York, London, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Hamburg and Istanbul.

“Live Earth” will also be broadcast in special live coverage on MTV Polska. In addition, the station will also show a special, ecological episode of “Pimp my Ride” with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest star, and clips in which young people will tell about efficient ways to protect the environment.

The audience of RMF FM radio will also be at the centre of things - the station will cover the concerts in the form of commentaries and live coverage. In the evening the broadcaster will replay the most interesting parts of the event – the “Live Earth” music will be played all night.

Extensive coverage then. But apart from getting to see lots of live bands play a few songs, what else will Poles get from the experience?

A man with a mission
Life for Al Gore has changed over the last few years far quicker than the rate of climate change. Not ten years ago he was ‘Al Bore’ – the man who was not only more wooden than a forest, but who also somehow lost an election he appeared to win. Or something.

Now, all of a sudden, he is ‘Mr Interesting’, a man with a mission, who can turn a power point presentation into a hit movie documentary with dire warnings about global warming, and bag himself an Oscar in the process.

Gore, the man of the moment, the inspiration behind Live Earth, has said that climate warming is not ‘about politics’, it’s about morals…’ Meaning, it’s not up for debate, ‘it’ is a done deal, beyond the questioning of us mere mortals.

So what’s the point of Live Earth then? ‘To raise awareness’, says the Live Earth web site.

But you would have to be living on planet Mars to have ‘low awareness’ of the constant, moralistic, media deluge on ‘carbon footprints’ and ‘carbon credits’. So what is the point of ‘raising awareness’ of something that everybody ‘knows’ and is ‘aware’ of already?

But maybe you wouldn’t have to be living on Mars to have missed that kind of media coverage. Maybe you might have been living in Poland?

It’s true – Poles have not been lectured about our ‘debt to the planet’ like those of you have in the UK or US. In a country that has been starved of economic development like Poland and the rest of the old ‘Eastern bloc’, has, being lectured by rich westerners - like Al Gore – about how we must cut our energy consumption (and cut the rate of economic growth) is frankly, a pain in the neck.

The constant self – flagellation that many middle class liberals go through in the west about global warming – “Ooo, I really must connect the manual knitting machine to the roof-top, small holdings wind farm, this weekend…” – is not so common among the aspiring middle class in Poland.

That’s because the Polish middle class ARE aspiring: much of the liberal, middle class in the UK, for instance, thinks advanced economic development is the reason why they are not happy…. “Perhaps if we went back to living in straw huts and drove around in ox - drawn carts we might improve our self esteem’, they ponder over organic nuts and berries.

So maybe the real target of Al Gore and assorted celebrities this weekend is not just to improve their self esteem and make them feel important: perhaps the target audience is people in emerging economies – like China, India, Poland, who want the benefit of economic development, so as to be in a better position to adapt to any change mother nature has in store.

But that rational attitude, for Al Gore, is immoral.

I think I liked him more when he was boring.

Belated happy July 4 from Poland

Poles still like the Americans, but not nearly as much as they used to.

According to the Global Attitudes Project by the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of Poles have positive feelings towards the United States. That’s higher than the average in Europe.

But support for America is declining in Poland. Back in 2000 – only seven years ago - 86 percent of Poles supported the United States.

So Poland may be one of the best friends America has got in this part of the world, but if the trend over the last decade is anything to go by, then this support is becoming more and more lukewarm.

Poland nursing a grudge

The EU deal that wasn't; striking doctors and nurses; and the Father Henryk Jankowski – Mel Gibson connection: the usual weird and wonderful stories out of Poland didn’t stop just because I went on holiday.

For the last two weeks now, nurses have joined doctors and come out on strike and camped themselves, literally, opposite the prime minister’s office. Just half a kilometer from where I live, a line of tents – a ‘white city’ - has emerged on the plush Ujazdowski Avenue, and lining the lush Lazinki Park.

Work to rule, even hunger strikes have been part of the protest – these people are pretty desperate. Not hard to imagine why as both sets of workers get less than the national wage for doing a job that requires a much higher than average level of skills and training.

The government has been unsympathetic (unlike the general public) to their plight and repeatedly claimed that ‘there is no more money’ – as they waste billions sending armed forces to Afghanistan and Iraq, and elsewhere besides.

The latest news appears to be an offer by health minister Zbigniew Religa for a 30 percent pay rise… next year. The nurses and doctors must be tempted to take the offer and pack up their tents.

EU agreement that wasn’t

Chancellor Merkel must have felt proud of herself when she got Poland to sign up to the new EU Treaty, an agreement which included Warsaw accepting a new method of voting that decreased its influence in Brussels. This was a surprise as the ‘square root’ method favoured by the Polish government was something that the Kaczynskis claimed was ‘worth dieing for…’.

Well, President Lech Kaczynski had to come home from the summit in Germany with his tail between his legs and very much alive.

Unfortunately, his brother, PM Jaroslaw appears to have been none too pleased by Lech’s work abroad. He suddenly announced days after the deal was signed and sealed that, in fact, Warsaw did not accept the deal. He said that it was unfair to relate the voting weight of a country to the size of its population. Why? “Because Poland’s population would have been much larger than the current 38 million if not for the Nazis (and Soviets) murder during WW II.”

Er…um…

This is indeed a strange argument. Should Ireland be given greater voting strength in the EU because it suffered a 25 percent decrease in its population during the Potato Famine of the 1840s?

As someone said to me at work today – to think something like that in private is understandable, but to use it as a negotiating tactic is ludicrous.

A better argument would have been to point out that WW II, and the Soviet occupation after it, severely stalled the lively development Poland experienced between the two world wars.

But even still – I don’t think even that argument would have increased Poland’s entitlement to EU structural funds.

Father Jankowski – a bit like David Beckham, actually

The Dziennik newspaper printed a story today revealing that the priest so prominent during the Solidarity strikes of 1980 has contacted Mel Gibson to direct the planned biopic of Jankowski’s life.

Funding for the new movie is no problem – some big name sponsors are ready to sign up. All the film needs is the delicate touch of Gibson, director of the film The Passion, which ultra-Catholic Jankowski obviously greatly enjoyed.

It was also revealed that Father Jankowski is releasing a new range of cosmetics – notably a perfume called HJ – and he is also, via the Jankowski Institute, opening a chain of cafes, which will be serving wine, vintage Jankowski, as every bottle has the priest’s face on it.

But what will this new perfume and wine smell and taste like?

Well some are expecting them to smell and taste of…anti-Semitism.

Jankowski has been repeatedly told off by the Vatican for his anti-Semitic statements. In 1997 the Polish Church was forced to ban him preaching for one year after these kind of remarks, reported by the Anti-Defamation League:

‘[Jankowski said]…in June 1995, with Polish President Lech Walesa in attendance, that members of the Polish government have secret allegiances to Israel or Russia, and that the Jewish Star of David was part of the Nazi swastika and the communist hammer and sickle. In December 1995, during a meeting at his Church, Father Jankowski said, "I have nothing to apologize for my [anti-Jewish] words...Why shouldn't we talk about such things as the murder of Germans by Jews? Why may we not talk about the Jewish-communist administration that governs Poland today? The reason is that they have banks, and everything else in their hands."

So will Jankowski become the new Polish David Beckham, endorsing all sorts of products, from wine to cosmetics, or is his ‘brand’ already tarnished by his ugly prejudices?

Beatroot goes to Venice

Back July 2

What’s Polish for: Can I fondle your buttocks?

"Proszę, czy mogę pogładzić twój miękki tyłeczek"?

Just one of the lines in a small ‘tourist glossary’ thought up by an Irishman who is a frequent visitor to the weekend tourist hotspot of Krakow.

The phrases in the little dictionary are written out in English phonetics, so the above sentence I suppose would read:

‘Proshe, che moge pogwaghich tfoy mienki tewechek?

The phrase book also includes other chat up lines (all bound to fail, of course) such as: "Jestem twoim niewolnikiem". (I am your slave’).

There have been many stories in the press about Brits on stag party weekends in Krakow, Wroclaw, etc getting stinking drunk and upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the oh, so cultured inhabitants of the city. This is just the latest of them.

The Super Express tabloid even reported in the oh so supiorior tone of the most snobbish of Krakovian – “The locals are disgusted’….’They [drunken British - Irish] deserve a punch in the nose…’. Blah, blah…

They seem to miss the point that the phrasebook is obviously a silly joke.

They also seem to forget that there are well over half a million Poles in Britain and Ireland and many of them are going out nighttime and getting completely hammered.

And long may they do so.

Being a half Brit/Irish myself, I find some of the antics of the British and Irish in Poland slightly embarrassing. But let’s get this in perspective: a few hundred lads having a good time in Krakow should be met with as much tolerance as a few hundred thousand Poles should be welcomed in the UK and Ireland.

The Super Express tabloid – which when reporting the story adopts a high condescending tone (in amongst pictures of topless women and other tabloid trash) is merely reproducing some of the rubbish journalism that has appeared in the British press about Poles since they arrived in high numbers three years ago.

Super Express deserves a punch on the nose.

Update: I can reveal (as the hacks would say) that the origin of this ‘phrase book’ is actually TWO YEARS OLD - that's before the cheap airlines started flying over the British stag parties. This dumb Polish tabloid story is not even fresh news! Dumb, gets dumber. Cheap journalism gets cheaper still. See online phrase book here.

Bush in Poland

He came, he saw, he got an attack of the trots.

Not Trotsky-ists – the few hundred anti-globalists who turned up in northern Poland to protest the visit of the President of the Free World do not have many old Trots in their ‘movement’ – Bush got an attack of the G-8 trots, otherwise known as ‘Euro summit diarrhea’.

But he found time to meet up with President Lech Kaczynski and wife, Maria.

Notice the woman with dark hair, of ample bottom and the sleeves of her top shrunken by too much washing machine action, behind Kaczynski? She’s the translator, as Lech has no clue what Bush and Mrs Bush are babbling on about - otherwise known as 'Bush's verbal diarrhea'. Maria speaks English, apparently.

The translator later had to translate to George Bush in English what George Bush was babbling on about.

Bush also got to discuss anti-missile shields with a dog; meanwhile, Lech Kaczynski abducts a member of the Putin Youth Movement, Nashi.

Bush then found time to apologise for getting Lech involved in Iraq...anti-missile shield...CIA prisons…Afghanistan…...still no visa waver program...…

Council of Europe nails Kwasniewski and WSI as CIA stooges?

The report headed by Dick Marty (above) claims that CIA prisons in Poland were known about by the then president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and operated in collaboration with agents from the now disbanded Military Intelligence Agency (WSI).

The report’s main finding, I suppose, is that Poland and Romania both operated clandestine CIA prisons, but the one near Szymany airstrip in northern Poland was set up to hold so-called High Value Detainees (HVD) – in other words, the most dangerous of suspected al-Qaeda type terrorists. Poland was the site of the CIA’s most important and sensitive ‘prison’ in Europe.

The 9,000 word report – much of which I have waded through – paints a picture of the now disbanded Military Intelligence Service (WSI) as a ‘cartel’ operating on behalf of ‘self-interested elites’, and beyond the oversight of civil bodies, such as parliament, or even the prime minister’s office.

But not the president’s office. One ‘military intelligence source’ (the report is full of unnamed ‘sources’) told Dick Marty:

“Listen, Poland agreed top down…from the president, yes….to provide the CIA all it needed.”

The recruitment

CIA agents apparently identified ‘point men’ within the WSI – which the present PiS government, when giving reasons for disbanding it last year, described as operating as if it was a ‘state within a state’. The report seems to make the same allegations.

Once identified and recruited these ‘point men’ would be told things on a need to know basis, and that information stayed within this small circle of operatives.

The WSI had two functions, says the report, when aiding the CIA in the rendition program. It provided military security when prison transfers were taking place; and it infiltrated other state organs, such as the Air Navigation Services Agency, the Border Guards and Customs Office to make the smooth running of the transfers a very closed secret.

Top agent – Jerzy Kos?

One of the top agents was apparently Jerzy Kos, who was head of the Board of Mazury-Szczytno Airport Company. ‘He was our man,’ says one ‘source’.

Later Kos went to work for a private construction company (Wrocławska Jedynka – in which the public National Investment Fund has a stake, and which has received state loans in the past of over 1 million zloty to pay off redundant workers) which gained contracts in war torn Iraq. This Mr Kos is quite a guy.

The plot thickens

When, in June 2004, Kos became a kidnap victim in Baghdad, the American Special Forces staged a rare raid to free him (see Fox News report of rescue). The implication is that Kos is a very valuable guy to the CIA.

CIA sources said that they picked Poland initially, then Romania, as they believed that much of central and eastern Europe does not, yet, have trustworthy secret services.

But Poland, in particular, was different. One source told Marty:

“We have an extraordinary relationship with Poland. My experience is that if Poles can help us, they will.”

Poland negotiated its agreement with the CIA, says the report, in late 2002, early 2003.

“We have established that the first HVDs were transferred to Poland in the first half of 2003,” says the report’s author.

The most highly prized HVDs to have been detained in Poland were Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shekh Mohamed. Both were subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques...' These ‘techniques’ have been controversial, to say the least (and described here).

The evidence for all this comes from the many ‘unnamed sources’, and from flight logs (see here), which have detailed the landings and taking off of CIA planes – evidence, most of which identified by Human Rights Watch when it first made the allegations back in November 2005.

The ‘new evidence’ – or ‘proof’ as Marty has termed them - appears to come from the interviews with the unnamed sources.

So they are impossible to verify.

But the picture that the report paints is plausible. The government disbanded the WSI because it thought it was out of control, and was operating, just as the report says, as a state within a state, on behalf of ‘elites’ – the present government, of course, would refer to these elites as the infamous ‘uklad’.

So it is perfectly possible that renditioned prisoners were being held in Poland, before being flown off to even more darker places, under the noses of prime ministers and parliamentarians. Hence their genuine ignorance.

But the accusation that former president Aleksander Kwasniewski was in on all this is a dangerous one for him, just as he is making his ‘political comeback’.

Yesterday, Kwasniewski said: “I deny it. I have as much many times.”

Yes, Olek, but do we believe you, anymore?

Read the report

Poland to ban smoking in public?

Don’t hold your breath.

Law makers, some within the ruling Law and Justice party, have proposed a bill in parliament to ban Poles smoking in public places.

The move comes as England is preparing to do the same on July 1.

But will the Polish government support such a fashionable, but still draconian, law?

No. Not this government. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has questioned if ‘democracy’ and restricting freedoms such as having a smoke in the pub are compatible.

Quite apart from the fact that PM Kaczynski’s view of sovereignty over our own bodies is rather….well, selective, he has a point.

The health fascists would answer that smoking harms others too – look at all the passive smoking that bar tenders, or non-smoking customers, have to do in pubs.

Others would retort that the evidence of how dangerous passive smoking is, is a little hazy, to say the least.

But banning smoking is not just about health. The UK government, for instance, is using smoking – just as it is urging us to ‘reduce our carbon footprints’ – as a new kind of pseudo-morality. Smoking is not just bad for our health; it’s a sign of ‘bad morals’, too (in western, relativist societies that are not really sure what a ‘bad moral’ is anymore). Smoking has become an easy issue to make a pseudo-moral consensus from.

But not all European countries will be as keen to follow the UK or Ireland’s example.

Polish politicians are scared of the voting power of smokers – they wouldn’t even dare to put a high tax on cigarettes (a pack of 20 is still only a couple of dollars).

And in Germany the last government to make such a law was the Nazis – so modern governments don’t want to go there.

And what about the Dutch government? I am just back from Amsterdam, and it is clear that if a Dutch government banned smoking (Jamaican cigarettes) in ‘coffee bars’ then they would watch a rather huge chunk of their tourist revenue go up in smoke.

Education Minister Giertych’s new school reading list

More Pope, less literature...

This is the latest great idea from the Roman Giertych Education Think Tank (which is about as subtle as a ‘tank’, but with very little ‘think’).

Giertych said yesterday on the radio that ‘teachers all around the country have sent in suggestions for what should be on compulsory reading lists for school students.' He said that more about John Paul II should be put on the list but…

Gombrowicz, Witkacy, Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, Dostoyevsky...

...should be taken off.

These are, of course, some of the most significant names in literature in the last century, or so.

The secretary of the late Witold Gombrowicz, Rita, for instance, told a newspaper this week that her former boss would have got the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1969, I think) if he had lived a little longer. Unfortunately he died that year and the prize went to …Samuel Beckett.

So if Gombrowicz is good enough for a Nobel Prize then why shouldn’t he be good enough for Polish school kids’ reading lists?

I am not sure that teachers all over Poland really have been writing in pleading for Gombrowicz et al to be – like gays – banned from Polish schools.

So what has Giertych himself got against these writers, one wonders?

I am off to Amsterdam on a bit of journo bizzzzness. Next post Wednesday evening.

Ciou for now….

Tinky Winky is a fully fledged heterosexual

So says one of Poland’s leading sexologists.

B92 reports

Ewa Sowinska, who had earlier announced her suspicions about the Teletubby named Tinky Winky, said that her fears had been allayed by an expert.

"The opinion of a leading sexologist, who maintained that this series has no negative effects on a child's psychology, is perfectly credible," she said in a statement today.

"As a result I have decided that it is no longer necessary to seek the opinion of other psychologists."

But wait a minute: how does this sexologist ‘know’ about Tinky’s sexual orientation?

And didn’t Sigmund Freud say that humans – and teletubbies in particular – have ‘polymorphous sexualities’?

And isn’t there a more ethical point to be made here: isn’t the sex life of celebrities, like Tinky – not to mention his winky – their own personal business?

I wonder what Jaroslaw Kaczynski makes of all this…

Stop Press: But the nonsense is not over yet….Public television TVP has admitted that it has cut out around one minute of the BBC comedy program ‘Little Britain’ because it featured...a…wait for it...gay vicar.

Yes but, no but, yes but….he was a protestant vicar!

Stop stop press
See a nice little series of short Polish films taking the piss out of what they call ‘Sexual lustration’…the sexual vetting of cartoon characters. The sound track is from a song by Elektryczne Gitary from the comedy movie Kilar. The title of the song is Ona jest pedalem. The joke in the title is that ‘pedalem’ is a nasty word for a gay man (like faggot) but exclusively used for a homosexual man.

So the title in English would be, I suppose:

She is an arse bandit

Which somehow, doesn’t really go, does it? But the little clips successfully ‘sexually lustrates’ all of the famous Polish cartoon characters. See it here.

Beatroots conquer Europe

Well, we haven’t really: but we did get second place in the Satin Pajamas Best European Political Blog Awards.

Well, we didn’t really. We were joint second. But we were joint second with European Tribune – one of the first – like Fist Full of Dollars, the curators of the Satin Pajamas awards – European blogs, and ones that most bloggers have heard of. They have some respect.

So, a blog about Poland has made its little, red stained mark. Just like getting barszcz beetroot soup on your best white shirt, and even the girlfriend’s mother doesn’t know how to get rid of it.

Oh, by the way – the winner was the brilliant and well known Northern Irish blogger, Slugger O’Toole – just like I said he would be.

Polish watchdog official ‘outs’ Teletubbies’ Tinky Winky

Children’s Ombudsman Ewa Sowinska [surly, ‘umbudswoman’?] has told the Wprost current affairs weekly she thinks Tinky’s ‘handbag’ (purse) could be a sign of latent ‘homosexuality’.

Tinky Winky is one of the Teletubbies characters, a children's programme that was a massive hit in Britain a few years ago, and which has been imported by the TVP public broadcaster to Poland.

Apparently, Ms Sowinska has been watching the programme carefully and has detected something disturbing. She told Wprost this week:

“I’ve noticed that Tinky Winky carries a woman’s handbag, but I didn’t think he was a boy, at first. [But when she discovered that Tinky was indeed a boy] …later I found out that there may be some kind of hidden homosexual subtext…”

A hidden homo-subtext? A Teletubby in the closet?

Of course, many can mock poor old Ewa Sowkinska for obviously being a graduate of the Giertych School of Media Studies, but a little digging into the subject appears to confirm that Tinky, and his Winky, may indeed have a dark secret.

For instance, a quick Wiki of Tinky brings the following result:

‘Tinky-Winky is the largest of the Teletubbies, has a triangular antenna on his head, and is notable for the red luggage (described by the show as a "magic bag", but often described by other media as a handbag) he carries. Due to this handbag, he is unofficially described as a gay icon.’

Oh, my Gaaaaaawwwd!

But that’s not all. Teletubbies not only includes ‘gay icons’ but gender benders, too. In the Wiki entry on the ‘Po’ character it says:

“Although many are unsure of Po's gender, or consider her to be male (possibly because of her scarlet colour and tomboyish antics), she is clearly referred to as female in several episodes,”

Jeeeeezus! Po is obviously a cross dressing lesbian! A Tubby-dike!!!

The Teletubbies is a devious plan by all those liberals in the BBC to INDOCTRINATE POLISH KIDS with homosexual propaganda.

But Sowinska should look further than the Teletubbies for strange sexually inspired behaviour in children’s programmes.

I mean – just look at Superman and his predilection for wearing his underpants outside his trousers? And what about Batman’s fondness for spending long hours – sometimes over night! – alone with Robin (the Boy Wonder) in the Batcave?

Surly Gotham City must have laws against that sort of thing?

Looks like Education Secretary Roman Giertych was right all along, but was not going far enough – ban gays from school, and the Teletubbies from the TV screens of Poland! Now! Before they get our kids…

Ryanair pulls Kaczynski romance advert

The Polish government threatened to sue Ryanair after an advert made fun of the prime minister’s alleged affair with old Solidarity colleague.

The rumors of an affair (see above front page of Polish tabloid last year) between Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Law and Justice MP Jolanta Szczypinska have been around for sometime. And the supposed love affair was used by the cheap flight carrier Ryanair as the subject for one their characteristically zany advertising posters. IOL reports:

The ad shows the deputy, Jolanta Szczypinska, with Kaczynski under the headline "Are they thinking of a honeymoon?"

A comic book speech bubble shows Kaczynski asking, "Shall we take the government plane?", to which Szczypinska replies: "There's no need, Ryanair guarantees the lowest prices."

Ryanair, which is known for unorthodox publicity campaigns, "must pay for this", Szczypinska fumed on Wednesday.

"I am shocked. This is a scandal," she said in an interview with the daily newspaper Dziennik. "Illegal exploitation of the image of the head of government is a crime."

We rang up Rynair for a comment and they told us that they have now cancelled the advert after the legal threats. Shame.

That the government is suffering from a humor by-pass will not come as a shock. But many might be skeptical of the rumor of the romance. Some think it’s a PR stunt.

The dumbest thing about all this is the government’s willingness to sue all and sundry when being made fun of. A secure, mature government would take the mocking on the chin. A childish administration will throw a tantrum.

Expect more tantrums.

Satin Pajamas Awards

the beatroot has been nominated for ‘Best European Political Blog’.

The Northern Irish blogger Slugger O’Toole is in the pack and he will be hard to beat. But maybe we could get second?

Vote here. Vote early. Vote often….(as they used to say in Northern Ireland).

p.s.
Oh, by the way: the beatroot is two years old today. I thought I would do it for a year, just to see if we could get a Poland-related blog noticed: and it went OK. So I thought I would do it for another year, just to see what happened: and it went even better. We now get 20,000 reads a month. Not bad. Cheers to all the people who have contributed. So now I am gonna do another year – just to see what happens…

Polonophobia: it's not a phobia

Or: why the personal is not the political.

Since psychologist George Weinberg first described, in 1969, what is basically a politically and culturally produced prejudice as homophobia, the term has slowly grown in acceptance. The EU has even passed a resolution describing a whole country - Poland - as homophobic (i.e. ‘Polish homophobia’).

Due to the success of this term, anyone who finds a point of view objectionable simply labels it ‘a phobia’ - an irrational psychological response.

It all started of course with xenophobia; then came homophobia; then Polonophobia (Poles are not immune to this nonsense either); more recently we have Islamophobia; as a reaction to that we now have Christophobia (yawwwwn) and Judophobia (I mean – we used to have a perfectly good word for that: anti-Semitism).

How to de-politicize a prejudice in one easy step – label it a mental disorder.

Sociologist Frank Furedi demonstrates here how the rise of the ‘phobia’ term coincides with the growth of ‘therapy culture’ in the West and lists five good reasons why politically progressive people should not be using this word.

Me, I'm getting phobo-phobic.

More?
Polish homophobia? It’s not a phobia, the beatroot, April 22

Warsaw Equality Parade passes off without much opposition

4,000 turned up for what is becoming an event in the calendar in Warsaw.

Maybe only 100 turned up for the counter demonstration by the new youth wing of the League of Polish Families (LPR) – an organization hastily cobbled together after All-Polish Youth got kicked out of the party after one too many embarrassing neo-Nazi type antics.

LPR had tried to get the Equality Parade banned, of course – this time on the feeble excuse that homosexuality was against Christianity, and the Polish Constitution [?] which apparently privileges relationships between men and women.

Unfortunately for LPR the Polish Constitution also guarantees the right to free speech and assembly, a concept that they and many in the present government are still struggling with. And as Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the Mayor of Warsaw pointed out, to ban the march would be to go against a recent ruling in the Court of Human Rights.

I was sitting in the Jazz Bistro in the centre of town watching the parade pass. It looked fun. One old lady sitting at a table next ours said to her elderly companion: “Such a lot of young people….it’s that Roman Giertych I blame….”

Photo by Joseph Vogt

p.s. - Some moron has been impersonating the beatroot on the All-Polish Youth web site. The second comment is me, the first is not. How sad.

pps – There was a March for Family and Life in Warsaw today, organized by ultra-conservatives. It’s hard to know how many turned up. It says here between ‘600 and 3,5000’, which is rather vague. Was that the gap between what the organizers said and what the police think? .

David Irving speech called off in Warsaw

The ever crazier British historian – who has a new book out – will not be allowed to publicize it at the Warsaw International Book Fair, currently on in the capital.

The ban was initiated by the Director of Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Piotr Cywiński, who apparently complained to the cops (see Irving's web site for more details). Irving has been in Warsaw, apparently 'doing deals' with 'eastern European publishers'.

I can’t say that I support denying a Holocaust denier his right to spout his rubbish anywhere he wants. He is a very offensive person, but letting him speak is the best way to show what a fool he is.

If you want to hear the type of thing he would have told the Warsaw Book Fair then see this Youtube clip of a speech he made last October.

More?
Irving in Poland makes documentary - the beatroot, march 25

New word in Polish dictionary: homoagitacja?

Equality Parade, Warsaw, May 19 14.00…… Krzysztof Bosak, leader of the Youth Movement of the League of Polish Families not pleased: “ Public propaganda of homosexual lifestyle is a threat to public morality and is against natural law as well as family values, which are in our Constitution….”.

Or homo-agitation in English. It’s the linguistic contribution to the Polish language of education secretary, Roman Giertych.

To agitate means to arouse interest in (a cause, for example) by use of the written or spoken word.

Homo-agitation will not be allowed in schools – meaning gay groups will not be allowed into schools to ‘promote’ homosexuality - if Giertych gets his way. He is going to create a new law to ban these heathens entering the gates.

In the mind of Roman, heterosexual kids could turn gay at any second, if exposed to 'homosexual propaganda'.

His idea of a law banning gays from high schools has support from Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and from Andrzej Lepper, also part of the coalition, Giertych cliamed today.

His is an interesting, and fluid, view of sexuality. It’s even one many gay and lesbians might agree with, in a way.

I remember great rage among my fellow sociology students when models of homosexuality were introduced in lectures claiming that a part of the brain of homosexuals was somewhat unusual.

Or how about the (in)famous Xq28 chromosome. This, I remember caused outrage among gay campaigners when geneticist Dean Hamer published his research in 1993. That would mean that gays are, in some way, 'abnormal'.

The dominant view in sociology back then (late 1980s, early 1990s) was based on a Foucaultian model of sexuality – of the power of ‘discourse’ and ‘counter-discourse’. The work of British sociologist Jeffrey Weeks is typical of this view. Any biological explanations were not PC, even ‘fascist’.

Well, they needn’t have worried – as they have an unlikely ally in Education Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Roman Giertych – the man who gets highly agitated by the thought of homo-agitation. He’s a man, basically, who is afraid of speech and the power he thinks it has - another curious similarity between the conservative nationalists and some trendy liberal, deconstructionist post-modernist.

We live in strange times.

A misanthrope pretending to be a humanitarian...

...is like a cannibal on a healthy diet, who only eats vegetarians.

We are currently in the middle of National Vegetarian Week in Poland. Oh, joy. Sometimes they can act a bit like little Hitlers - vegetarian fascists.

Although only 1.5 percent of Poles don’t eat meat at all, the few fundamentalist grass-eaters that are here have some tasty tactics to force their obsession on the rest of us. Polish Radio reports:

’Come and buy our mouth-watering dachshund veal! Cheap shoulder of cocker spaniel. Dog paws and heads. Only two zloty a kilogram.” – a butcher wearing a white blood stained coat shouted at a makeshift stand in the centre of Warsaw.

He was wielding an enormous axe, chopping what looked like animal parts, but in reality were soy cutlets covered in mashed beetroot[!!!]. But some passers-by actually believed it was real meat. “This is absurd. It shows how ignorant many people are if they assumed it was real meat”, says Cezary Wyszynski, a vegetarian since 1996, from the Viva Foundation, championing animal rights.

Note the contempt that animal lovers have for their fellow man: 'ignorant'! Now who would that be, then?

Iwona Kossowska from the Empatia or Empathy Association explains why the organizers decided to shock people.

“We want to show the people of Poland that it’s sad to divide animals into those that are loved and those that are eaten. We ask – why? Is there a real difference between a dog whom we love and a pig that we eat?’

Er...

Each year 470 million animals are slaughtered in Poland. More than one million a day. Almost one thousand every single second. No one seems sympathetic to those animals. They are completely unnoticed and forgotten. They are proudly eaten every day. Sold in supermarkets. No one cares for them. So, we want to recall that not only dogs and cats deserve attention and care. Pigs, cows, calves, chickens, fish, rabbits, goats, sheep are living creatures that feel the same as do cute and loving dogs.”

Note ‘sold in supermarkets…’ – another current obsession that some ‘liberals' share with their conservative nationalist counterparts in Poland. Both would like to go back to the good old days (and still the sad experience for the many car less poor today) when a mother had to drag her kids from shop to shop each day, paying for over priced food from miserable, unhelpful shop keepers.

Of course, in some countries people do eat dogs. And the reason why people don’t eat dogs in Poland and the rest of Europe is that dogs were used for work – they controlled the sheep that were kept for wool or eaten.

What’s sadder than animals kept in bad conditions – and there are many – is humans that become obsessed with animals, above any concern for humans. These are misanthropes dressed up as humanitarians.

And there are many of those, too. Too many.

The vegetarian is another example of our modern day obsession with our bodies. Food is not seen as something that we in the West have lots of, to be relished and enjoyed for its own sake. For the grass-eaters and tree huggers food says something about ourselves – it’s become a pseudo morality.

The militant vegetarian is someone who is a product of an age with little else to believe in, so the body and what is put in it becomes, literally, a ‘way of life’.

But what a sad, ultimately meaningless, way of life.

And anyway - vegetarians eat...(sniff) beetroots! Don't they have rights, too?

Poland has no friends

That’s why it won’t ever win the Eurovision Song Contest.

100 million Europeans watched agog last night at the annual festival of ketch, awful music and strange dance moves held in Helsinki this year.

For those of you outside the continent, the Eurovision Song Contest has been staged every year by the European Broadcasting Union since 1956.

Winners are chosen by viewers sending in text messages.

The event was won by Serbia, the very first time it has entered the competition. Poland didn’t even make the final this year. The UK came joint second to last and Ireland came rock bottom.

The Ukraine came second and gained the most votes from Polish voters. The girlfriend and I, plus dog, picked Ukraine – the entry being sung by an ageing drag queen (photo). Well, why not? It’s all very Eurovision.

Serious studies have been done on the contest (probably by ‘cultural studies’ lecturers with nothing better to do) on how people make voting decisions. BBC reports:

Dr Alan Howard, from Reading University's school of human sciences, has surveyed 1,000 fans of the contest on how they would cast their votes.
He says the results undermine the belief voting is influenced by the countries' traditional loyalties.
Only 24% of fans agreed tactical voting was reducing the contest to a farce.
The 12-month online survey received 1,126 responses from fans in 51 countries.
A total of 57% said a good performance on the night would make them vote for an act but only 7% said they would vote tactically.
Thirty-three per cent also said lyrics would have an influence while 16% said the attractivneness of singers might sway them.
Dr Howard said: "For some time now, the Eurovision Song Contest has gained a reputation as a light entertainment show rather than an important competition.

What are they teaching kids at uni these days? ‘…the results undermine the belief voting is influenced by the countries' traditional loyalties..’ Ha, bloody ha.

The winners and losers are not chosen on the merit of their often sparse musical talents. Sorry Dr Howard, but it is all about nationalisms and politics.

The competition has expanded in recent years and now includes many eastern European countries. The viewers of these ex-communist countries all vote for each other, with predictable results. Look at the top ten countries this year:

Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Belarus, Greece, Armenia, Hungary and Moldova.

The Balkans and eastern Europe are completely dominating the contest now. But it’s always been the same, even before they turned up. Cyprus always votes for Grease and Turkey. Scandinavia always votes Scandinavia. Israel has recently started to vote for Russia, due to the fact, no doubt, of the new Jewish Russian migration there.

Poland always votes for Ukraine.

And so it goes, year after year. Unfortunately, even with the eastern European in-built bias, nobody seems to want to vote for poor old Poland. Does nobody love the Poles?

Poland didn’t even manage to get out of the semi-final, held on Friday this year. The only time Poland did well was the first time it entered the competition in 1994, when Polish diva Edyta Gorniak sung ‘That’s not me’ and came in second – probably as a result of a sympathy vote.

All the western European countries are equally isolated – with nobody voting for France, UK, even Ireland, which used to win the competition nearly every year during the 1990s.

I would do what Italy did years ago – don’t even bother sending in an entry.

The lustracja document I have signed...

...must be given back to me.

That is the judgment of the Consititutional Tribunal. It is unconstitutional to archive it anywhere.

Waiting....

Fiasco! Polish Lustration Law – not constitutional

Key parts (at least half) of the articles in the Lustration Law – an issue that has been tearing Poland apart - breaks the Polish Constitution.

That’s the verdict of three days of deliberations and argument by the Constitutional Tribunal.

The government’s flag ship policy is in an ugly mess.

I have just been watching - along with millions of Poles - the verdict by the very formal looking tribunal, read out by two judges, one with a black hat on. This was serious stuff. Their verdicts took one hour 15 minutes to read out.

“Governments are not above the constitution”, said the judge. “If they are then that is the way of a dictatorship…The law should not be retroactive….There must be a guarantee of a legal defense [which there is not, at the moment]…the aim of lustration should not be revenge.”

This is a damning verdict against the government.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski has already pre-empted such a verdict by insinuating that the Constitutional Tribunal is itself full of commies…but then he would, wouldn’t he?

Here are the main bits of the verdict

* The lack of a right to appeal a decision in the Supreme Court is unconstitutional.

* Lustration of journalists is not constitutional.

* Lustration of rectors of universities is not constitutional.

* Lustration of scientists working in private research labs [?] is not constitutional.

* Lustration of heads of publishing houses is not constitutional.

*The public listing of previous secret service operatives is not constitutional.

*The current lack of access to files by anyone lustrated is unconstitutional.

*Lustration of heads of stock listed companies [??] is unconstitutional.

*Lustration of debt collectors [???] is not constitutional.

* Even the layout of the form that people have to fill in saying that they never collaborated with secret services is not constitutional.

* The tribunal also ruled that proof of collaboration with communist authorities must include, not only evidence that the subject agreed to collaborate – as it is in the present law – but that there must be evidence of actual collaboration. So the burden of proof now weighs much more heavily with the accusers: the government.

The Lustration Law is in tatters

The new Lustration Law, which came into force in March, requires hundreds of thousands of people in media, law, etc, to fill in a form declaring they have never collaborated with any secret services which spied on Poles during communist times.

This includes foreigners such as myself, a journalist. This was unconstitutional. I am extremely pissed off.

The law – which is a widening of the net of two previous laws – has created an atmosphere of suspicion, and for many people, fear.

I wasn’t scared, I just thought the whole thing was ludicrous. It’s good to know that the Constitutional Tribunal agrees.

Lustration worse than Stalinism?

At least under Stalinism it was Moscow persecuting Poles. Now it has been Poles persecuting Poles.

That’s an argument I heard on the television today. And you can see what they mean. Instead of trying to unite Poles around some common sentiment – a true solidarity – they pick over the scabs of the past. And the puss weeps out. A fractured society gets more fractured still.

What’s worst of all is that the Institute of National Remembrance is not required by law to share whatever information they have about someone. They make a decision based on what is in old, dusty files from many, many years ago, and that seems to be that. Everything is done behind closed doors. In secret. No transparency whatsoever.

Sounds familiar of another, even darker age?

The best solution is to open the files to everyone - a suggestion that the government has itself made if the verdict went against them - and let’s see what is inside. Then the court of public opinion can decide who is guilty, and who is not.

What a strange country, with a sad past that twitches like a corpse, refusing to recognize that it's over. Finished.

Beware ye supporters of the right to choose…

You risk ex-communication.

You have been warned.

10 years ago Poland and UK were a better place?

Or were they? Maybe even nostalgia ain’t what it used to be…

Us Brits are getting a little nostalgic. I was in London, May 1997, when the British voted in Tony Blair’s New Labour government, and in so doing, kicked out a Conservative Party which had ruled for 18 long years.

Many Brits woke up the next day, after sitting up much of the night watching the Labour landslide on TV, feeling a little groggy but optimistic about the future. Maybe, as the Labour Party election campaign song sung at the time: ‘Things can only get better’…

And things have got better, but Brits seem to fear everything. The British got lots richer, but Tony Blair – who will be finally resigning in the next few days (another Iraq war casualty) - has presided over the death of British politics. In the absence of real competing visions of the world, politics in the UK has literally come down to how often people get their rubbish bins emptied. Maybe that is a kind of progress. But Brits don’t feel optimistic anymore. They feel scared. Of everything, of everyone.

They were optimistic in Poland back then too

Or that is how it seemed. I was living in Poland in 1997. There was a positive feeling about the place. People I knew felt good about Poland. Communism was gone and buried, and a new future was being born. Some were getting rich. Others could express themselves in a way they never could before. A tiny middle class was growing.

Things could only get better.

Fast forward ten years to 2007 and that Polish optimism is in short supply. The exodus of millions of Poles since the country joined the EU strengthens the feeling that post-communist Poland has failed too many.

The political scene has - as one journalist friend, who was out of the country for ten years, but has just returned – got a little ‘freaky’.

So what has changed in those ten years? Were things really so much better then? Maybe not.

For instance, unemployment in 1997 was around 13 percent. Today unemployment is 14 percent, but coming down from a high of 20 percent three years ago.

At the end of 1996 inflation was just under 20 percent! Now it’s around 2 percent.

The national average wage in 1997 was 12,000 zloty (400 dollars) – today its double that.

Fact is, the economy, compared to 1997 – when the economy was slowing down after being the ‘European economic tiger’ - is booming. Growth is one of the highest in the EU. Home ownership has increased, car ownership has leaped, people take more holidays, do more things.

Things really have got better, in Poland. So where is this pessimism coming from? It’s coming from two different places.

Life has not got significantly better for many. The east of the country has fallen behind. The country side – especially the one million tiny farms – have fallen behind. Those on fixed incomes have fallen behind.

The conservatives think that the country has gone to the dogs. Secularism – once the preserve of the ideological communist – has come in from the West, from the EU. ‘Gays demanding rights? Whatever next! They have them anyway (just as long as they don’t exercise them).Liberals? They are just partially reconstructed commies! What’s Poland coming to?’

It’s no shock to find that this is where much of the current government support resides.

In the other half of Poland – the half that did well or better – folks are feeling under attack. The aggressive policies of the Law and Justice led government are aimed at those they think carved up the country, post 1989. Now they want some of the action, the influence. It’s the politics of ‘Teraz kurwa my’ – now it’s fucking our turn.

Basic freedoms – the freedom of speech, of assembly, have been attacked. People are being sacked from the state sector, many times, because they are seen politically unclean.

It’s all very vulgar

So the reason for the lack of optimism is not from purely material factors – Poland is actually doing very well – it’s more from a politics of failure. The winners have not spread there good fortune around, and the losers feel that Poland has declined morally (spiritually) and are determined to get their own back.

Poland should feel optimistic – except for its politics: which is arcane, much of the time, in substance, nasty, unstable.

All things that Tony Blair would not like at all. He has succeeded in killing off any type of politics in Britain. A dull, apolitical consensus is all there is in poor old blighty. The obsession there is that the planet has gone to the dogs, and we are all doomed to an environmental hell.

But in both Poland and UK, things really are getting better. The feeling of things getting worse comes from a fear of the future, brought on by a miserable, future-phobic politic.

The French post: the organic dialectic, subcultural sublimation, expressionism and the sexist equation

Question: Does an undertheorized multi-perspectival sociological ventriloquism lead to a potential mannerist deformation in representations of social existence?

Just asking.

The French election is today and the probable winner thinks that Muslim poor kids in the Paris suburbs are ‘scum’, and the loser is a socialist candidate who appears to be even more conservative, in many ways, than her rightwing candidate (oh, don’t you just love modern day, post-ideological politics).

But why is France in such a mess? I think it is because of their loony intellectuals.

Postmodern gibberish

I have been reading a book about Einstein and relativity. It’s one of the most magnificent intellectual accomplishments of all time (his theory, that is, not me reading the book).

But just look at what ultra-post-modernist feminist French academic superstar, Luce Irigaray, thinks about it all. In one of her essays, Le sujet de la science est-il sexue? (1987), she turns her attention to an issue that has been virtually ignored (though for good reason, cause it’s nonsense) in treatments of Einstein's famous theory.

She poses the highly intelligent question:

“Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us [?]. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest...” .

Er...merde! I get the impression that she has no clue what she is talking about. So why would anyone want to publish this bull?

For those of you not yet acquainted, the E in the equation stands for ‘energy’. That energy is equivalent to the mass (m) of something times speed of light (c) squared. It made scientists realize that the amount of potential energy within matter is enormous, if you can find the technology and unstable enough atoms (like in uranium) to be able to release it.

But the speed of light (which our French post modernist seems to think is ‘male’ and ‘sexist’) is a vital part of that transformation of mass to energy. It’s a law of physics.

So the reason why Einstein picked speed of light rather than…say…the speed of a Toyota pick-up truck…or a female rowing team, is because it would have nothing to do with anything at all.

Saying that ‘privileging the speed of light’ is sexist is like saying that photosynthesis is a chauvinist pig!

The French are going to have problems, whoever is in the presidential palace, because their academics and so prized intellectuals are stark raving mad.

(Check out, too, the postmodernism generator. Just keep clicking refresh and it generates, automatically, a fresh new postmodern essay – full of ‘sexed equation’ type gibberish. The French would love it!)

May days in Warsaw

It’s been the ‘long weekend’: May 1 and May 3 are national holidays in Poland, so virtually everyone takes three days off.

May 3 is Constitution Day, in celebration of Europe’s first ever written, coded constitution. It was very unlike the 250 page EU ‘constitution’ that wasn’t. A constitution has to come from grass roots pressure: the EU Constitution is coming from Eurocrat-roots pressure.

May 1 was Labour Day and an old holiday the communists were more comfortable with. This year there were a couple of marches by the Old Left and the New Left (less than a 1000 people in total). The Left is finished in Poland.

In the centre of Warsaw they had a rather lame attempt at recreating the ‘People’s Republic’ times. It could have been good, but was half hearted and rubbish.

Best thing was the giant Mis, from the very popular comedy of the same name from 1980. In the background you can see Jo Stalin’s gift to Warsaw, the Palace of Culture.

(photos by tracka/beatroot productions)

Sign the Geremek petition

Update, May 3: The much respected and award winning British blogger, Clive Matthews, aka Nosemonkey, at the Europhobia blog joins the Geremek campaign.

Update: British historian Norman Davies (who has been sent a lustration questionnaire!!!) in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on the new law: "This is either going to end in farce or coercion, and that would be the step from democracy to authoritarian rule. Academics and journalists are in the firing line. This is nothing to do with winkling out collaborators. This is about showing loyalty to the Kaczynskis."

A Polish European member of parliament (MEP) is in danger of losing his seat. In danger, that is, not from the European Parliament, or the voters that put him there in the first place, but from the Polish government. This is not democracy as we know it in Europe.

Bronislaw Geremek was one of the leaders of Solidarity through the 1980s. Later he served in several governments after 1989, and eventually was elected by Poles as a Member of the European Parliament.

After the latest ‘Lustration Law’ came into force earlier this year – which forces every public person to sign a declaration saying that they had not consciously collaborated with the communist secret services – Geremek has refused to sign.

He has signed similar declarations three times before, but being asked to do so for a forth time is, for him, ‘humiliating’.

The Polish government has decided that if he does not sign then they can dismiss him as an MEP.

But as EJP reports:

The European parliament has supported Polish MEP Bronislaw Geremek over his refusal to comply with a new Polish national law to weed out communist-era secret police informers.

Poland’s electoral commission has announced that Geremek was disqualified from being an MEP after he refused to submit a declaration saying that he had not cooperated with communist-era services.

Bronislaw Geremek "is a political personality of the highest esteem who has always stood up for democracy in his country and for European unification," said Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering, Thursday in Strasbourg.

"We will examine all legal possibilities that he can continue his work," he added.
Five groups of the parliament – the centre-right, socialist, liberal, green and extreme-left- have pledged to defend Geremek against attempts to strip him of his mandate.

The interference by Warsaw into affairs that are between the elected MEP and his voters contravenes the usual standards of democracy. Aside from whether you think that he should sign the vetting document, or not, the principle of an elected official being answerable to the people who elected him is a vital one and must be respected by the Polish government.

There is a petition in support of Bronislaw Geremek. It says:

We, European citizens, are deeply concerned by the principles of democracy and human rights and give our full support to Mr. Bronislaw Geremek. The Polish law of lustration, which threatens him of dismissal from his mandate of Member of European Parliament, directly breaks the rules and values to which Poland solemnly adhered, while becoming a Member State of the European Union.
We firmly urge for the Polish law of lustration to be repealed. Otherwise, we ask our European governments to consider the application of all the provisions of article 7 of the Treaty.

Please show your support for democracy by signing the petition here.

More?
bloggers for Bronislaw, foe
Euro Parliament discussion of mandate of Polish MEP Bronisław Geremek

p.s. Milan Kundera signed it!