Idiots guide to Polish elections Part I

First part of an occasional series on possibly the weirdest bunch of politicians in the world. Maybe.

Being an idiot is not a disadvantage when trying to understand the Polish political scene. In fact, it maybe an advantage.

So if Polish politics makes you feel a little nauseous, disorientated, maybe even depressed, then the beatroot is here to help.

You see, Poland is a land that has been making up for a lack of elections before 1989 – due to the intervention of something called Soviet communism – by having quite a few ballots and governments since 1989. The last government has only lasted two years.

Poles have always loved Italian style – although they prefer their shoes, clothes and architecture to their short – lived governments and coalitions.

Shame then that they seemed to have inherited Italian politics without the style.

Now the Poles have been called upon to give the consent on October 21 to yet another one.

Maybe less than half the electorate will bother. But what are the issues that they will be expected to drag themselves the polling booths this time?

Economy

The Polish economy grew by over 7 percent between January and the end of March this year.

That’s good.

The Law and Justice government claim that this is something to do with them.

That’s bull.

But the government is claiming that because the economy is growing so fast this means that more tax will be coming into the government coffers, which means that they can increase spending on protecting the rural east of the country from the ravages of the market (one of their main constituencies) the poor, state sector etc…

They sound like a bunch of socialists, but they would probably punch you on the nose if you accused them of this. They are, after all, made up of the conservative faction of the Solidarity movement.

The main opposition party, Civic Platform - a small state, but still socially conservative party (also made up of another Solidarity faction) - think that the growth in the economy is all to do with Poland joining the EU three years ago. They aim to cut taxes, cut public spending and shaft the poor. Used to believe in a low, flat tax policy but are now a little bit scared of being so open about this as it seems to have pissed off many voters.

Corruption

Jaroslaw Kaczynski thinks that he is the modern day Josef Pilsudski – who presided over the Sanacja regime between the two world wars in Poland.

The Sanacja regime attempted a "moral sanitation" of the newly reborn Polish nation, and Kaczynski has got it into his head that post communist Poland needs a moral sanitation to sweep the place clean of …well….post communists.

The Polish post communists – i.e. rich people – say the Kaczynski brothers, are a bit like Russian oligarchs, who got their sweaty hands on the newly capitalist economy post 1989. - except they are not nearly wealthy enough to purchase Chelsea FC or any other English football clubs – like real oligarchs like Abramovich.

The post communists and liberals have carved up Poland in their interests and are nasty and corrupt and ….nasty – say Kaczynski-ites.

The Kaczynski brothers have promised to clean up Poland like Travis in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver wanted to clean up New York (and sweep the post communist/liberal scum from the streets of Warsaw).

The opposition maintains, however, that the government is using the police, prosecution services, and the secret services, to intimidate and harass political opponents.

The ex-communist Left says that it wants to restore order in Poland. Shame then that everyone thinks they are a corrupt bunch of shits....

Foreign Policy

The Law and Justice government is accused of creating the worst relations between its immediate neighbors – Germany and Russia – since 1989, and the EU generally regards Warsaw as a bit of a circus freak.

The opposition - both centre right and ex-communist left – wants to restore better relations with Berlin and seek to calm down antagonisms with President Putin.

Religion

The government believes that the true character of the Polish nation can be found in its Catholicism. It has been very close buddies with Radio Maryja, who many believe is less pro-Catholic than anti-Semite.

But never mind: when you are a government that seems to have virtually no friends in the mainstream media, then the extremes are going to be attractive.

Only problem is: the head of Radio Maryja, Father Rydzyk, was exposed via a tape recently telling a group of students in his ‘media school’ that the First Lady, Maria Kaczynski, is ‘a witch’ and the president was too accommodating to the ‘Jewish lobby’

The opposition says that with friends like that, then who needs enemies?

Rydzyk has refused to apologize for his wayward comments, although a commonly heard joke maintains he has.

Rydzyk rings up the Presidential Palace, residence of President Lech Kaczynski. Lech picks up the phone.

Rydzyk: Hello, is that Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski?

President: No, actually it’s his twin brother, Lech.

Rydzyk: Oh, sorry [puts phone down]…

You see…he did apologize after all …

A few Polish turkeys vote for Christmas

And so it came to pass…the Polish Parliament votes for an election, probably October 21, just under two years after the last one (photo - Gazeta.pl).

Watching the debate before the dissolution vote Friday night, I couldn’t resist feeling a little teeny weeny bit sorry for some of the members of parliament, as I simultaneously laughed my head off at them.

As the speakers ranted from the rostrum, two were caught getting out little screw drivers and removing the name plates in front of their seats to take home for souvenirs. They knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

“Look, kids, I really was a Member of the Polish Parliament,” they will tell the grandchildren, one day, as they drool into their vodka, the fading memories of one of the weirdest terms of parliament in the history of weird parliaments whizzing round their crazed little brains.

Meanwhile, Jan Rokita – maybe the next prime minister in waiting – from Civic Platform feigned complete disinterest in the whole proceedings by flicking through what looked like an art catalogue.

On the government benches, Jolanta Szczypinska – who has been rumored to be Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s...um...girlfriend...was showing the MPs to the left, right and behind her a text message she had received on her mobile. Maybe it was a photo of Jaroslaw’s cat?

The debate itself was the usual pre-election stuff: the opposition taunting the government, the government trying to find things it was proud of.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski only turned up for the vote after the debate - the ruling Law and Justice party left it to their resident pitbull, Jacek Kurski to defend the government’s record.

He listed the government’s...um...achievements...most of which had nothing to do with them: robust economic growth, lowest inflation ever, lowest interest rates, etc….

He also claimed as a success the fact that President Lech Kavzynski had not ‘staggered around drunk’ in front of any memorials – a reference to an incident when the previous president, post-communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, once did appear to have had one (six) too many at a ceremony.

And then they voted. Most of the MPs knew that an election was the only way to resolve what has been two years of political instability. Many must have voted with a heavy heart, as many from the League of Polish Families and Self defense, for instance, will not be coming back.

But as to who will win the election is not clear. Civic Platform are favourites – although two opinion polls have shown a lead – the first time for 9 months - for Law and Justice. The Kaczynskis have around a 25 percent electoral base that no amount of scandal seems to shift.

And the Kaczynski team are amazingly good campaigners. They get dirty, really dirty. Expect all manner of scandals to emerge about other politicians. They are going to dig and dig for dirt. Corruption is going to be their platform, yet again.

So don’t bet against ‘the Ducks’. Many of the scandals over the last two years, and the incompetence and the manipulation and the intrigue, have literally been like water off a duck’s back.

Polish election coming – spend, spend, spend

Polish politicians are going nuts. An election is just around the corner and politicians are throwing money at the electorate in the hope of buying a few votes.

There is an expression in Poland – the election sausage. Political parties organize little fetes and political meetings, and in amongst the rhetoric there would be a few sausages, a beer and other ‘gadgets’ thrown in for free.

Well, politicians are not dishing out sausages anymore in Poland, they are dishing out child benefits, tax breaks on having kids, longer maternity leave and much more besides.

Take yesterday in the Polish Parliament. The government was determined to get through tax breaks for Poles who have kids. It had promised an extra 3 billion in a tax give away. So what did the parliament – all sides of the parliament – do? They voted to increase the give away to...6.5 billion!

Ooo, look at the size of that sausage!

The finance minister, Zyta Gilowska, was a little surprised and described the vote as ‘madness’ and the Polish equivalent of a parliamentary ‘cock up’.

The opposition - all types of it - had the gaul to criticize the government last week for coming to an agreement with the Solidarity trade union to increase the minimum wage. The largest opposition party, Civic Platform, claimed that such a move, just before an election this autumn, was a blatant election sausage if ever they saw one.

The government replied that they were just keeping to promises they had made earlier.

On Monday the government forced through parliament an increase in the length of maternity leave and an extra few zloty payment for each child born.

These 'pro-family' policies are in keeping with the government’s belief that if you pay Poles a few extra zloty for having children then everyone will go home and have an ‘early night’.

It’s the equivalent of a ‘child friendly sausage’ - or maybe even 'child abuse'.

But all this is going to leave the government’s budget plans in a bit of a mess. The next government – who ever that may be – is going to have to pick up the tab for a pre-election spending spree.

The Parliament will probably dissolve itself tomorrow which makes an election in late October a certainty.

Mother Teresa, Princess Diana – the populist saints?

Mother Teresa died 10 years ago today, just days after ‘The Peoples' Princess’, Diana died under a flyover in Paris. History has been kind to them since.

Both Teresa and Diana had a lot in common – they have both been remembered for their personal suffering, their selflessness, and for good works (Mother Theresa for ‘helping the poor’ – Diana for ‘helping’ people with AIDS and boldly going where no princess had boldly gone before – into the middle of a field of landmines.

Mother Teresa is on a fast track to Sainthood – and there are still many that would like to cast Dianna as some kind of secular Saint.

There has been nearly as much coverage today in Poland of the death of Mother Theresa ten years ago as there was in the UK on the tenth anniversary of the speed crash death of Diana.

But are their reputations so deserved?

Diana has been portrayed as a victim of the media’s greed and intrusiveness – quite forgetting that she courted their attention when she wanted to. She was also a victim of a jug-eared adulterer, apparently.

And Mother Teresa?

Father Tomasz Jaklewicz of Poland's largest Catholic weekly Gosc Niedzielny told Polish Radio today::

'I think that blessed Mother Theresa is very popular in Poland. Maybe this is because she is associated with Pope John Paul II. She is one of the three persons in white - John Paul II in his white cassock, Mother Theresa in her white sari, and I would add here brother Roger of the Taize community in his white habit. These three persons constitute a kind of an icon of the Church in the 20th century. What is interesting, they are not so much like saints of the old type, whom we pray to and ask for intercession, but they are more like role models. I think each of them, in their own way, present the face of the Church that is close to people.'

Mother Teresa as role model?

Christopher Hitchens – the author of the Mother Teresa biography The Missionary Position makes comments about the Mother of Calcutta that are equally compatible (although substitute the word 'church' for 'media') to Diana, who Tony Blair once called ‘The Queen of Hearts…(puke).:

What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism...

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.

But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

Well, indeed.

Beat’s back

So, a month has gone by and all hell has broken loose in Poland (see post below).

So much, so normal, I hear you cry, ruefully.

And you would be right, really. Things on the political scene have just gone from nasty, to really nasty.

Me – nothing much has changed either, really. Didn’t get to play my guitar, though.

The only real change has been that we discovered on a routine trip to the vet yesterday that the dog (above) only has one testicle where it should be! The other one is somewhere else, apparently, but we are still looking for it. Knowing him, it’s somewhere inside his brain.

He has also developed some worrying cross dressing habits when we are out.

Still, the dog and Polish politics have got one thing in common – they are both full of bollocks.

Poland’s Rubicon crossed?

This is Editor of Gazeta Wyborcza Adam Michnik commenting after the arrests of an ex-interior minister, an ex-police chief and an ex-head of the PZU national insurer (see here, here and here) last Thursday.

The Rubicon has been crossed; the Rubicon separating a law-governed democracy from the country of a creeping coup d'etat. There is no longer any doubt - the Kaczyński brothers and their milieu will use whatever means and tricks possible to hide the truth about the grim secrets and to remain in power until the elections….

The opposition are saying that the Polish police force, public prosecutors and secret services are being used to intimidate, harass and gag political opponents.

Michnik – imprisoned for being an anti-communist activist in the 1960s - draws some alarming parallels between the Kaczynski administration and even darker days in Poland.

[…] to arrest political rivals shortly before elections is something new. One is reminded of the 1946-1947 period when the Soviet-imposed communists invalidated electoral registers, imprisoned opposition candidates, and ultimately rigged the elections. After that, until 1989, there were no free elections in Poland.

Hyperbole? Paranoid?

But I have seen some very scared people in this country in the last two years. And that fear, whatever its justification, has had real effects. It’s not just Michnik who fears opening the door early in the morning and being confronted by men in a black balaclava on backwards, only their eyes peeking through the scary wool ware – as Janusz Kaczmarek was early Thursday morning.

This government believes that a kind of Polish oligarchy grew up with the fall of communism. I think that is partially right. A lot of sticky fingers got their hands in the pie early. It is the same in all ex-communist countries.

But the Kaczinskis go one step further than that. They see an organized conspiracy between ex-Stalinists and the new middle class liberals in the media and in business generally, in the old secret services, judges, constitutional courts….and even in organized crime.

Hyperbole? Paranoid?

The way the Kaczynskis have gone about breaking up the supposed oligarchy – the uklad – has been to create a parallel universe, the old Polish political tactic of cronyism. Nothing new there: Polish governments have been doing that for years. But they have done it with a zeal that few have seen since…well, back in those darker days.

This has created its own pinball of paranoia throughout the country.

Whatever – the politics of paranoia gets results. The Kaczynskis zeal plays well with many in Poland. It’s basically the new Polish politics of class.

Small traders, rural folk, those in unemployment black spots, who have not done as well as the shiny elites and new middle class, will vote for this type of populism.

The shiny elites and new middle class – often same bunch and children of the old communist elites - despise the government and its allies. And it’s easy to see why.

An election is coming. And after the election not much will change. Poland is now a country rife with good old fashioned class conflict – and when you strip away all the hyperbole and paranoia, that’s just about the long and short of it. An election will not solve that.

Kaczynskis on holiday, parliament in recess...

Aug. 11….the ruling coalition has been broken up and elections in October now look (almost) certain…the beatroot will return first Monday in September to offer unrivalled bloggy coverage of what promises to be a truly mind boggling election campaign….Ciou for now!.....

...so the beatroot is going into an August recess, too.

Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski went on holiday this week. A strange time to go on holiday when your coalition government is on the point of collapse.

But as Jaroslaw told the newspapers this week, it’s important to re-charge the batteries, and ‘catch up on some reading…’

Well, that is what the beatroot blog is going to do, as well. I haven’t played my guitar for months, and the girlfriend is complaining I haven’t spoken to her for as long.

So we will be back on Monday, September 3, to start up all over again.

Have a lovely summer.

the beatroot

Duck bites fox!

The Wprost cover this week...

….It’s PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – or, Kaczynski’s Law and Justice) and LiS (Liga and Samoobrona, the weird ex-Stalinist/Catholic nationalist alliance between Roman Giertych and Andrzej Lepper.) LiS is Polish for ‘fox’.

Kaczynski (the Duck) has the power to call an election – LiS – those cunning foxes – would rather he kept the coalition going, and their ministers in the ministries.

The current ‘crisis’ talks continue. The nation holds its breath (in case it catches something nasty).

Warsaw Uprising 1944: 'What more could be done?'

Those were the words of leader of the British Labour Party in 1944, Clement Atlee, as Poles rose up against the Nazis during the Warsaw Rising, that began on August 1 and lasted 63 bloody days.

The answer to the question was: a lot more than the Britain did, along with many others. The imperative from the British foreign office’s point of view was – don’t upset Stalin.

Stalin, with forces on the bank of the River Vistula, was quite content to let the Nazis and Polish Home Army destroy each other – all the better for the Soviets when they did finally enter the city three months after the Uprising was defeated and the Nazis had retreated.

Many Russian historians claim that the Red Army was exhausted and had no supplies. But that doesn’t explain why Stalin had refused permission for the RAF to land anywhere near the city during the period when it was flying planes in from Italy to try and bring a few supplies to the insurgents.

But there was no real political will in Britain to do much more. Stalin had been promised by Churchill et al that Poland would be in his sphere of influence after the war ended. Warsaw was his.

Few in the British media seemed to have had problems with this. The lone voice, as Norman Davies points out in Rising 44 (see chapter here), was George Orwell. Writing in the leftwing Tribune on September 1:

I want to protest against the mean and cowardly attitude adopted by the British press towards the recent rising in Warsaw…..

...As soon as the news of the rising broke, the News Chronicle and kindred papers adopted a markedly disapproving attitude. One was left with the general impression that the Poles deserved to have their bottoms smacked for doing what all the Allied wirelesses had been urging them to do for years past, and that they would not be given and did not deserve to be given any help from outside.

...The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots.

[A] message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: ‘Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.’

Well, why don’t you speak your mind, George? Orwell was in the process of writing Animal Farm when he penned those words. It must be remembered that it was not just the leftwing press that was a ‘boot-licking propagandist’ – just about all the other journos joined the chorus of parrots.

But most of the left in Britain did remain a Stalinist ‘whore’ up until 1956. And it’s only comparatively recently that Stalin has become the moral equivalent of Hitler.

But as usual, even though he was a socialist writer, Orwell was nobody's whore.

More?

Brilliant site on the Uprising here and the Warsaw Rising Museum site here.

Just like magic – new Harry Potter in Polish!

Just days after the release of the latest (and final) part of the J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, four chapters of the novel have already been translated into Polish and put on the internet.

Of course, the owner of the rights of the Polish version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Media Rodzina in Poznan – not to mention the highly regarded translator of all the previous books, Andrzej Polkowski – are a little upset.

The planned publishing date for the Polish version is scheduled for January 27, 2008.

This is not that unusual, however. A version in Spanish of the fifth book, Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, appeared in Venezuela soon after the original English publication was released. Not surprisingly, the instant pirated version was not very good. Apparently it included passages which, as the plot built up the tension, lamely concluded: “Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry,"

But Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, seems to be a Potter fan. Two people connected with the ‘translation' were arrested for crimes against Hogwarts.

But that’s not as bad as what goes on in China. There, they often released fake, pastiche translations of the books, even before they are released in English. Examples of such include: Harry Potter and the Crystal Vase, Harry Potter and the Golden Turtle, and most famously, Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon.

Horror in France, Mazur, government chaos, no cucumbers…

About this time, the summer media should be well into the silly season (called the ‘cucumber season', here) in Poland, when UFO’s are spotted in a pub in Olsztyn. Well, not this summer…not yet.

The Sunday morning TV news was full of dire weather warnings of another thunder storm heading this way, after a tornado had blown off roofs in southern Poland on Friday night – apart from that, everything as normal: there was the ubiquitous Andrzej Lepper spouting off about being Andrzej Lepper (and his alleged sex scandals). Nothing new there.

And then at about 11 O’clock the news of the horrific crash of a coach carrying Polish pilgrims from the north coast to a shrine near Grenoble in France.

‘Thirteen dead’; ‘at least thirteen dead’; ‘twenty dead….twenty six dead.’

After the shock, the search for what, for whom, to blame began. It seems the brakes failed on a tight bending mountainous road in southeast France. But why had the driver taken the coach down that road in the first place, when there was clear signs that it was not suitable for large vehicles? Since then we learn that many Polish coach drivers have been doing the same, taking passengers down a road known in the area as a notorious black spot. Many dead, human error.

President Kaczynski pronounced three days of national mourning. This has led to minor deprivations for Poles – such as Rod Stewart delaying a concert in Gdansk by one day. The Rolling Stones will go ahead with their gig, Wednesday in Warsaw. I’m sure the Poles can cope.

Election, or not, announcement delayed

But can they cope with the delay of an announcement by the Kaczynskis whether or not they are finally going to ditch their troublesome junior coalition partners of the League of Polish Families and Lepper’s Selfdefense, and have an election that has been on the cards since the very beginning of the government, exactly one year ago last week? Now Poles will have to wait till Thursday.

Someone I was talking to today – who probably thinks of himself as urbane, and not one of the government’s natural constituency – was pessimistic about any future election anyway. He blames the ‘low turnout’ (41 percent last time) for putting in ludicrous regime’s like the Kaczynski’s into government here, anyway.

That view is backed up by a recent Newsweek article:

Widespread voter indifference underscores opposition worries. Turnout in the last elections, in 2005, fell to just 41 percent. Many of those who might vote against Law and Justice—and the new generation of politicians who might stand against it—have already left the country. As for those who've stayed behind, they seem unable and unlikely to redeem Poland's name in Europe.

But maybe many of those who do not vote – often poor, uneducated – would come out and vote for Kaczynski anyway.

I’m sure the Poles can cope.

Mazur free, trail cold

Last week we also had the announcement from a court in Chicago that Edward Mazur – a Polish businessman that has lived in the US for over forty years – would not be extradited back to his homeland to stand trial for plotting the murder of police chief Marek Papala in 1998.

It was alleged that Mazur had relations with organized crime and Papala was getting in the way of ‘a little bit of business’, so he had him eliminated.

The American judge that heard the case said she could not believe how the case prepared by the Polish government against Mazur was so clumsily and sloppily put together. Even small but necessary details like dates were incorrect. They had failed to make a proper case. She threw the extradition request out of court.

The man ultimately responsible for the farce, Polish justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, vowed to ‘fight on’ to get extradition.

Though the present government was requesting extradition, it was the previous ex-communist SLD government which had let the trail go cold on the Papala murder. It had seemed, under the premiership of Leszek Miller, reluctant to dig too deep into the case.

The present government has pointed to links between Miller, former first lady Jolanta Kwasniewski, etc, and Mazur, the ex-communists and organized crime.

Whatever, many here think that they never now will get to the bottom of the case.

Can Poles cope with that?

Maybe it’s time for a few cool cucumbers…

Do we need a Polish election?

Andrzej Lepper thinks PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski is fed up with the current coalition.

Well, the beatroot agrees with Mr Kaczynski.

Why? Because Polish politicians are like nappies (diapers for our US brothers)...

...they should be changed regularly...

...and for exactly the same reason.

Some start drinking alcohol young in Poland

Two children last week were born with alcohol poisoning because their mothers were pissed out of their heads when they gave birth to them.

News stories of a similar type are sometimes like London buses: nothing comes along for ages, then several turn up at once.

So it’s been with the two ‘drunk baby’ stories. About mid week it was reported that a baby was born with 1.2 promille of alcohol in his blood; yesterday it was reported that a baby girl had been born with almost 2 promille in her’s.

Alcohol poisoning can be fatal for new born babies, and the little girl was rushed to intensive care and put on a respirator.

The mother of the little girl – Grazyna K. (she is going to be charged with…I don’t know what, maybe grievous bodily harm) claimed that she, “Only hic had a cupple of glashes of wine wit me friendzhhh….’. When they tested her blood, 1.95 promille of alcohol was swimming around in there.

Maybe news stories travel together like London buses, or hang around together like the proverbial Polish drunks on the corners of housing blocks, because journalists start looking for them after the first one has broken; maybe people are more likely to report them after they see the first one in the news. Who knows? But just how common is the alcoholic, or binge drinking, pre-natal in Poland?

Not so pissed Poles

It is estimated that there are around 1 million alcoholics in Poland, and 3 million people ‘abuse’ drink. Annual consumption is estimated by the World Health Organization at 10 liters of (ethanol) alcohol per capita a year.

How does that compare with the rest of Europe? Well, quite well. The EU average is 12 liters a year. In Britain it’s estimated that over 6 million regularly ‘abuse alcohol’ – i.e. binge drink. Brits ‘binge’ 40 percent of the time they sit down for a drink. On average Brits consume around two liters more alcohol a year than Poles.

Luxemburgers - is that what we call people from Luxembourg?) drink 17 liters of alcohol a year, and so are Europe’s top piss artists (though I do not remember encountering a pack of drunks from Luxembourg on my travels – come to think of it, I don’t remember ever coming across a single person from Luxembourg outside Luxembourg; maybe they don’t like traveling all that much. They are probably too busy staying at home most nights getting completely trashed.).

In the US, ‘1 in 100’ babies are born with ‘Fetal Alcohol Syndrome’ (FAS). The symptoms of FAS include facial deformities, learning difficulties, stunted growth…

So what is the safe amount of alcohol for a mother?

Ability magazine claims that there is no safe limit:

[S}studies suggest even a single episode of consuming as little as two drinks may lead to loss of fetal brain cells (one drink = 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of hard liquor).

For everyone else, the British government, which is now on a crusade to make Brits drink like their European 'continental' partners (who, like Luxemburgers?) say that more than three to four units of alcohol (pint of beer) constitutes a ‘binge’…two pints of beer and it’s a ‘binge’.

The World Health Organization found that 38 percent of Polish men admitted that they were ‘binge drinkers’., 24 percent of Brits identified themselves with this label.

The obvious problem with all this advice is that there is no standard way of measuring what a ‘unit’ of alcohol’ is. Each country seems to have a different measure.

In Britain one unit is 8 grams of alcohol; in Poland one unit is 10 grams; in the US it’s 14 grams.

If you want to binge drink then go and do it in New York – there you can get through up to four pints of beer before the health police start to feel your collar.

So the two awful ‘drunk baby’ stories this week actually appear quite rare in Poland, a country that isn’t so every strange in its drinking habits – that’s why they are headline making stories.

What these type of stories are good for, though, is in creating folk devils with which we can compare ourselves with and feel superior. And what better folk devil than the smashed pregnant woman?

More?
FAS rates by country
(Warning: it is unclear how much symptoms of FAS in these children are caused by alcohol alone.)

Some like it hot

If you are going to ‘lose your cherry’ in Poland, it’s very likely you will lose it while on summer holiday. And you are going to be young.

That’s the finding of studies by people who study this sort of thing. The sun is out, and so is school, so girls and boys come out to play. Polish Radio reports:

“10 percent of 15 year old girls and 20 percent of boys of the same age have had sex. The average age of sexual initiation of teenagers in Warsaw is fifteen and a half years and that age has been going down, says sexologist, Dr Krzysztof Nowosielski from the Silesian Medical Academy.

“Ten years ago they used to start their sexual life at the age of 18, 19. Now they start at the age of 15, 16. So it’s some five years lower than a couple of years ago.”

Over fifty percent of youngsters have ‘gone all the way’ for the first time while on vacation. In the autumn, gynecologists report an increased number of teenage girl who are expecting a baby as well as youngsters with sexually transmitted diseases.

I lost my cherry (never to find it again) in the summer – a very hot summer, way back circa…1666. I was sixteen. So around about the average age of the current teenage Varsovian and their first night nerves. Oh, those first night nerves – actors opening major plays in the West End experience nothing like it. I was in such a state I was drinking – gulping – glasses of neat Cinzano! It was all I could find in the parent's cocktail cabinet. It didn't help.

But sixteen years old, back in Tudor times when I first…um…you know…’did it’ and ‘went all the way’ was about two years younger than the average among my friends in south London. In fact, I was driven to …you know…’break my duck’ with the sole purpose of screwing up my friends who had yet to be screwed.

Which is quite sad, looking back on it. But summer certainly gives kids the opportunity for a little summer lovin’ – although be careful of sunburn, it can make things very difficult.

Do I look back at 16 as being too young? Actually I do. But then again, kids are different now. Thirteen year old girls here look like 17 year old girls back ‘in my day’. The average 15 year old boy in Warsaw is often taller than many tall man-made structures – like the Empire State Building.

Which brings us to the law and when you should be able to mislay your small red fruit (the kind that makes Swiss kirsch) without being bothered by the law.

In 1932 in Poland, the age of consent was set at 15 for all sexual acts, be they hetero or homosexual. That doesn't fit the stereotype.

So gays have had legal equality since 1932 in Poland. In Britain they had to wait till 1967!

But having the same age of consent since 1932 is a bit daft. Kids back then were a completely different species. In fact, the age of consent is one of those strange ideas, based around ‘well, you have to draw a line somewhere..’ type thinking.
But do you have to draw a line? The age of consent in Switzerland is 16. However, there exists a close in age exception if the difference between the ages of the participants is three years or less. So in that country there is a relativity built into the law.

Whatever: summer in Poland, like in most other countries, is the time when the birds and bees dance in the air, and teenagers are thinking naughty thoughts about whether or not they are going to get…well, you know…a damn good shagging. It’s only natural.

Merkel, Hitler – same difference?

Every time Giertych senior opens his mouth something nasty comes out of it.

“Germans have been trying to dominate Europe for a thousand years”, Maciej Giertych, MEP told a Polish TV channel. He believes the present German chancellor is “trying to do the same, but using different methods".

Bad hair cut Merkel an equivalent to Hitler? Surly some mistake?

“Hitler’s methods were completely different, but I’m talking about a chain of actions taken by Germany over decades”, he explains.

Whereas Hitler used the Luftwaffe, Merkel is using the EU to bulldoze its way through Europe to dominate the continent in a demonstration of the Nietzschian will to power, perhaps?

“Mr. Giertych badly needs medical help. Germany has been implementing the democratic state principle for 40 years and we have a great chance for an advantageous alliance with them, yet such comments may destroy everything,” says MEP Dariusz Rosati.

Besides Giertych is not really being a threat to anything – the guy is increasingly an isolated eccentric on his last legs as a politician - may be medical help wouldn’t actually help him much at all. Giertych’s is an ideological sickness, a virus caused by his determination, as I have pointed out before, to live in the time of the great Polish nationalists such as his hero Roman Dmowski – way back in the 1930s. He loved the guy so much he named his son after him.

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.