The last post

Well...kind of. After three years and 646 posts, the beatroot is going into a summer hibernation - as all root vegetables should do at this time of year - only to re-emerge in the autumn bigger, better…etc.

We will be back in a slightly different form, however, taking a little more multimedia approach. And I am still going to write for other places. In fact, I can write more often elsewhere.

Thanks to everyone who has passed through here, at some time or another - and particularly the regular commentators, who helped give us a reputation for being a bit better than the ordinary blog.

And there has been quite a few folk passing by.

From January 1, 2008, we have had 289,248 hits with 238,814 uniques.

In April, the last full month, we got 79,542 hits and 65,303 uniques.

I know some commercial web sites in the English language in Poland that would be pleased with that.

The reasons for the summer break are many: over work, the need to recharge batteries, etc.

The Beatroot Republic

But mainly it’s because the beatroot has run out of a subject. This blog was really about Poland under the Fourth Republic - that two years of lunacy from the Law and Justice government.

It’s been six months since the demise of one of the strangest governments in Europe, certainly in my lifetime. And little did I expect to be caught up in it all.

So in case your memory has dimmed, let me remind you of how it was.

At one time we had a government with a cabinet made up of six inch nail swallowers, bearded ladies and other circus freaks.

The PM was Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leading the charge against what he thought was a cabal of communists, still clinging on, post 1989, in public institutions, government, organized crime and media. Jaroslaw didn’t just think there were legions of Reds huddled together under his bed - he was of the impression that they were under his nose, his hat and probably under his pet cat’s basket (I never did find out what his cat‘s name is, so let‘s call him Sebastian).

Jaroslaw launched an assault on what became known as the uklad by setting up a counter uklad. The nepotism that Poland has indeed laboured under since the fall of communism continued - except now we had a different bunch of cronies fighting over the spoils of being in power in this poor, long suffering country. Why a decent people like the Poles can’t ever get themselves a government good enough for them, we can only ponder on as one of those great unanswered questions - like, how large is the universe; or why it is we can’t tickle ourselves?

So close was the net he weaved around him that many expected Sebastian the Cat to get a job as Minister of Feline Affairs.

But he resisted. He did, however, end up by doing something even stranger - appoint Roman Giertych and Andrzej Lepper as his vice prime ministers.

This was too much for many of Kaczynski’s supporters, and it was all down, down from there into an inferno of madness.

Still, for a blogger, it was groszy from heaven. Every day brought some gory fascination. It was like watching the political equivalent of a slow motion car crash, on a loop.

If you came in late and have no idea what I am talking about then feel free to look back through this blog….and I never had to make one word of it up….Cue here wobbly screen like they do in old corny movies when cutting to another time, a memory, or when it’s a dream sequence.

Yeah, perhaps it was all a dream. And now we have woken up, haven’t we?

Haven’t we?

That's all, folks.

Potty Polish PM admits he ‘did inhale’

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We forgive you Tomaszewski!

Two Brits have sent me a link to their myspace page where you can hear the first hymn by English football fans in support of the Polish football team at this summer’s Euro 2008 football championships in Switzerland and Austria.

And it’s a great little song! Written by Will Hetherington and Rupert Slade - the latter lived in Poland for four years - it's about an English football fan depressed after England were knocked out of Euro 2008 by Croatia. He was thinking like I was thinking - who to support now? No Scotland or Ireland in the finals either (and Wales never qualify for anything, anyway). Just then, Magda, the Polish barmaid in the English pub he is sitting depressed in, pulls him a pint and suggests he support Poland - well, there are hundreds of thousands of Poles in the UK.

The title refers to the goalkeeper of the 1973 Polish side who (in)famously knocked England out of the 1974 World Cup finals.

Polska Song (Come back Tomaszewski - all is forgiven)

Sitting in the pub
The final whistle's still ringing in my ears
All our hopes are dashed
And summer laughter's turned to tears

In the final game,
All we needed was a draw,
But Beckham couldn't bend it,
And now three lions roar no more

But I'm shaken from my blues
The sound of singing full of pride.
Haven't you heard the news?
Poland's gone and qualified

Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska,
You're our boys in white and red.
Polska, Polska, Come on Poland
Go where others fear to tread.

From London to Warsaw
From The King's Head to The Swan
Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska
Together we are strong.

Don't look so down
Says Magda pulling me another beer,
Wipe away that frown
And find yourself another team to cheer.

Whatever colours we wear
Our passion is the same
'Cos football's here to share
So come and join us in the beautiful game

Well my team are firing blanks
And the summer fills me with woe
I may not know Krakow from Gdansk
But I'm willing to give it a go

Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska,
You're our boys in white and red.
Polska, Polska, Come on Poland
Go where others fear to tread.

From London to Warsaw
From The King's Head to The Swan
Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska
Together we are strong.

Hear Polska Song here.

Fritzl, Austrians and ...Radio Maryja?

The shocking, disgusting and incomprehensibly cruel case of the Austrian ‘children in the cellar’ has made some commentators look for sociological causes, in some unlikely places, for what is really the individual act of a psychopath. Even Poland’s cranky, ultra-conservative anti-Semites at Radio Maryja have been dragged into the increasingly wild comment-fest.

Many commentators have tried to explain, what I believe is almost the unexplainable, by trying to find something buried deep within small town Austrian culture. And they seem to be finding it in a place even colder and darker than the cellar under Josef Fritzl’s house in Amstetten.

The locals knew something, didn't they? So why did they look away, pretend it wasn’t happening?

Apparently, it’s all to do with Austria’s anti-Semitic past. Yup! Of course it is. But not only Austria's dark past. Look at this bit from Howard Jacobson’s column in the Independent (UK).

As chance would have it – let's call it chance, anyway – the unremarkable provincial Austrian town of Amstetten has looked away before. There was a concentration camp in Amstetten. Not a big one. Just a sub-camp of Mauthausen, of which there were approximately 50 dotted around lower and upper Austria. Since Mauthausen's speciality was extermination by means of slave labour, in particular the extermination of politically educated and vocal enemies of the Reich, we might fairly assume that Amstetten's speciality was the same. It is also worth noting that Amstetten was a camp for women.

Whether it is equally worth noting that the Polish Catholic radio station Radio Maryja [my italics] – a continual embarrassment to the Vatican on account of its nationalistic and anti-Semitic utterances – has opened several bases in the Austrian Tyrol, the first of them in Amstetten, I don't know…

Well, if he doesn’t know whether it was worth pointing that out - and I would argue that it was ridiculous to point that out in the context of this story - then why bother in the first place?

It says here (under religious antisemitism) that the founder of Radio Maryja, the anti-Semite Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, decided in 1999 to expand his operations in the Tyrol region, adding to the base already set up in Amstetten, the town where the disgusting Fritzl imprisoned his daughter and children.

That said, the small town of Amstetten (eastern Austria) is not in the Tyrol region, which is in the west of Austria, as is the district of Amstetten - which is a different place. Could this be a mix up with Radio Maria International (which Rydzyk did have an involvment with back in the 1980s in Bavaria) which does have a place in Amstetten?

Whatever. What has that got to do with this case? Where is there evidence that any lingering anti-Semitism in Austria, or anywhere else, had anything to do with such a freak case such as this?

Maybe Brendan O'Niell in spiked is right. What Jacobson and others are alluding to is this: Catholic Austrians, like those Radio Maryja listening Poles, are not like us. They are from the East and so do not think and behave as we do in western Europe. They live in a denial culture, hiding from their past, deaf and blind to their present.

That the ultra-conservative loonies at Radio Maryja can be dragged into a case so shocking - because it is so unusual - maybe shows up something a little disturbing about some western European thinking about Central and Eastern Europe. It tells us nothing, however, about what caused a psychopath like Fritzl to do what he did.

Update - maybe someone can help, here.

In the Jacobson article linked in the above post it claims that Radio Maryja had a base in Amstetten and then expanded and has now many bases in the Tyrol region.

But the town where Friztl lived is in east Austria. Tyrol is in west Austria. There is also a Amstetten district in west Austria, but very far from the eastern town of the same name.

We have also failed to find evidence that Radio Maryja has bases in Austria, as is claimed in the Jacobson article and the other link I give in the original post.

What we have found is that another radio network, Radio Maria does have a base in Amstettel.

Father Rydzyk of Radio Maryja had contact with a Radio Maria in Germany in the 1980s.

Could Jacobson be mistaking Radio Maryja with Radio Maria?

Help!!!

Poles decide London mayoral election?

That’s what the losing candidate Ken Livingstone told Polish Radio this week.

'The Polish vote may be anywhere between 60 and 100,000 and therefore it’s become a decisive vote. We all expect this to be a very close election.'

'So the Polish community will effectively determine the outcome.'

Well, with the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson winning by 140,000 first and second preference votes then the Polish vote may well have been decisive.

There has been a record turnout in the election for London’s mayor. OK, the turnout is still only 45 percent, but that’s about ten percent better than usual.

And out of the 2.4 million voters who did go to the Poles yesterday, maybe up to 100,000 - the number who registered to vote - were from Poland.

So both the main candidates - the incumbent Ken Livingstone and conservative rival Boris Johnston were on to the Polish community in London during the election campaign to try and appear as their candidate.

Livingstone, or instance, promised a Polish day in London every year, to fall on May 3, Constitution day in Poland.

Former Polish prime minister (and once actiong mayor of Warsaw) Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz - who is now based in London working for the EBRD - reportedly gave his pledge to Boris Johnson.

And many observers believed that many Poles were likely to have given their vote to Boris, as Livingstone’s old nickname, dating back to the 1980s when he was a hard left local government politician, is Red. And maybe Poles, who wouldn’t know too much about the guy and how he is, these days, a typically British ideologically-lite politician, maybe they were not too keen on candidates with a nickname like that.

Heaer both leading candidates on the Polish vote here.

Prince Charles opens Jewish centre in Poland

His Royal Highness was in Krakow today opening the new Jewish Cultural Centre, which he helped set up and partially funded himself. But the Polish media have been more interested in the Mrs Royal Highness (she's the one on the left - photo by Mada Matyjaszek) who accompanied him.

Prince Charles was in Krakow back in 2002. The story goes that when on a tour of the city he was inquisitive about the Jewish history of the place. It is the city of Polanski, of Schindler’s List - it’s in the outside world’s imagination of Poland’s Jewish history. But when Charlie found out that there was no significant Jewish centre left in the city, he was amazed.

Cue uniquely strange British Royal English accent (and to think they once called the English accent Queen’s English - have you actually heard that women speak? It’s like no other accent in England.)

“Bout that‘s absolutely scanduuuulloos… I moist do something aboot it,” Charles declared, large ears flapping impressively.

And so he did. Through a foundation based in London he helped develop the Jewish Cultural Centre in Krakow - a five story building to house cultural events and much more.

He also shelled out a few quid from his own pocket (or, being a Brit myself, should that be he even shelled out a few quid from my pocket - the British have always shelled out on behalf of these parasites, after all).

And so it came to pass that Prince Charles - future King Charles III (snigger) - came to Krakow to cut a few ribbons and unveil a few plaques.

But watching the media coverage of his visit this evening, it is the fact that he has been accompanied by his new-ish wife, Camilla Parker Bowles that has caught their attention.

Of course, the typically British upper class equine Camila (why do they all look like horses?) is no match for the supposed beauty of Princess Diana (although, let’s be honest: Diana was the beauty they wanted her to be, not the one she was). Camilla will never be the world media star that Diana was.

Maybe the world will remember Camilla as I do. Back in the heady days in the early 1990s, when Diana was separated from Charles, there was a transcript published in a British tabloid - and never refuted by the Palace - of a conversation between the future king of England and his long time equine lover. The conversation, recorded by some ham radio nerd, included the memorable lines by Charles to Camilla:

Oh, how I wish I was your tampon [!].

Why there wasn’t a republican revolution the moment that crap dropped onto the doorsteps of the UK is, and will always be, a mystery. A man who would rather be a tampon than a monarch is really only fit to be …a royal tampon.

But more importantly - nowhere in the media coverage was it asked why some British royal was the one who initiated a project that should have been essentially Polish in character. Even a tampon has more imagination than that, apparently.

Gorbachev signed JP II contract killing?

The weekly Wprost, out tomorrow, shows a politburo document, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, which appears to warrant a KGB contract killing on John Paul II.

Or so claims veteran American journalist iJohn O. Kohler n a book, also released tomorrow, Chodzi o papieża szpiedzy w watykanie (About the Pope. Spies in the Vatican). The politburo document, seen by Dastych, says: "Use all available possibilities to prevent a new political trend, initiated by the Polish pope….[…]…if necessary - reach to means beyond disinformation and discreditation."

The document, which dates back to November 1979 - one year after Karol Wojtyla became pope - is signed by eight top Party officials including Konstantin Rusakov - ominously the guy who coordinated action with the Polish Communist party, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, for all his glasnost, was obviously deeply worried about the potential of John Paul II to inspire what he later partly did - Solidarity, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so on…

In Rome, Pope John Paul II was shot four times on May 13, 1981 by Mehmet Ali Hagca, who had vowed to kill the pope back in 1979, though before the politburo document was signed. Hagca’s motives seem to be ultra Turksih nationalist, not in pay of the KGB.

Krakow tolerance march passes off peacefully

Observers reckon a few hundred gays and lesbians [and friends - see comment] took part in the annual Tolerance March in the conservative southern city of Krakow, today.

The demonstration last year ended with 13 arrests and plenty of argy-bargy from the usual suspects in All-Polish Youth and other groups that attract people fond of very short hair cuts.

John Beauchamp, who provides these photos (see more on his flickr page) told me that he thought that there were more reactionaries in the market square in the centre of town than there were gays and lesbians.

And almost outnumbering both groups were the police, assisted by dogs (who were on their own tolerance march in celebration of their usual doggedly polymorphous sexual desires).


Though the whole thing passed off without any violence, the atmosphere has been a little tense for a few days now in Krakow - with posters put up by arch-conservatives warning the people of Krakow that if gays and lesbians are continually allowed to march and protest then ‘gay marriages’ will surly follow, and Sodom and Gomorrah will stalk the land having their wicked, wicked way with Poland.

But you get the sense that the issue of homosexuality hit a peak a year or two ago. As a rallying point for the increasingly marginalised catholic-nationalists - who, lest we forget, were in government only half a year ago here in Poland - the bogey men and women of the gay and lesbian community are losing (quite literally in some cases) their allure.

Poland’s teletubby ombudsman hangs up handbag

Ewa Sowinska, who leapt (big foot first) into international infamy when she accused a Teletubbie of being gay, has resigned from her post as Children’s Ombudsman.

She had to - she was going to be sacked by the government and parliament, anyway. Her critics say she is only concerned, not with the welfare of kids, but pushing her League of Polish Families catholic-nationalist type agenda whenever she can.

And she can try and laugh it off, but calls for gays not to be allowed to work with children - perhaps she wants a kind of sexual orientation lustration process? - and the time when she was concerned over Tinky Winky’s sexual and emotional wellbeing will always be what she will be remembered for.

More on the background to this on the excellent Uzar News.

IVF for married couples only, says Polish ‘liberal’

Jaroslaw Gowin, from what commentators misleadingly refer to as the ‘liberal’ Civic Platform, told Radio Zet today that only married couples should have access to the wonders of the IVF procedure.

Why? Well, Govin, who is on the bioethics parliamentary committee looking into IVF treatment in Poland, told Radio Zet:

"Only a mother and a father are capable of giving a child a proper upbringing. Most dysfunctional children, including victims of paedophilia, are born out of wedlock.”

Oh, really? What a berk.

Govin was refering to the bill introduced by his own government which does not discriminate against married couples being able to get the treatment.

The IVF issue became front page news last November after Health Minister Ewa Kopacz announced plans of reimbursing couples from the state budget. One in five couples have trouble conceiving here, and the demand for IVF is growing

The opposition Law and Justice (PiS), alongside Catholic organizations and other usual suspects have opposed the state paying for the procedure and oppose IVF in general, of course. Newspaper articles have been written accusing women who get medical assistance to get pregnant as ‘immoral’. Men are reduced to being ‘sperm donors’.

Maria Środoń from MaterCare International, which describes itself as an association of Catholic Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says:

The mother is just reduced to virtually a breeding animal. Likewise, IVF dehumanizes the sperm donor. He is required to achieve arousal in a clinic closet with the aid of pornography.

Blimey! Women as ‘breeding animals’. Men being forced to use pornography to get off in hospital clinics! Call Radio Maryja – and you had better be quick!

Despite opposition from the usual quarters, IVF is legal in Poland – its just that the state refuses to pay for it. Clinics have been performing the procedure since 1987.

It’s also becoming a booming market among foreigners coming to Poland to conceive, as the price of treatment, say for a British couple, is much less in one of the forty clinics here than in London, for instance.

The government has drawn up a bill on IVF regulating the procedure but is almost certain to back down on funding IVF from state coffers. So childless couples who can’t conceive the normal way better be well off. Poorer couples will just have to do without.

It’s one thing to oppose IVF from a religious viewpoint – but to stoop to the pathetic arguments used by Jaroslaw Govin, that kids born out of marriage will somehow be more at risk from child molestation, etc, etc, is just pathetic. And let’s stop the labeling of the current governing party as ‘liberal’. Civic Platform is populated by atavistic political recidivists, like many political parties in Poland. Period.

What’s left of the Polish Left?

Not much. And this weekend saw another lump fall off the alliance of leftwing parties.

On Saturday, ex-communist Marek Borowski (on right of photo, mid nose facilitation) announced that he was taking his party, Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDLP) out of the Left and Democrats (LiD) coalition with the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). Borowski said that this was because the SLD had failed to consult his SdRP party when kicking out the Democratic Party (PD) - made up of some old Solidarity leaders such as Bronislaw Geremek - out of LiD.

Marek Borowski’s SDLP is actually a splinter group of SLD. So a splinter group has left a coalition made up of members of a party they used to be a part of.

To recap: SLD ended the LiD alliance with PD, while SDLP left the left alliance over SLD not consulting them over kicking PD out of LiD. LiD was also made up of the non-communist leftwing Labour Union (UP), but nobody bothers to tell them anything.

Are you following me? Well, if you are then you are doing better than many of the Left’s former voters, who have been deserting them in droves over the last five years.

From the heyday of the 2001 election, when the SLD bagged 42% of the popular vote and a majority in the Sejm, the leftwing vote has all but collapsed in elections since.

So SLD - itself a coalition of left wing parties which got together after the immediate collapse of communism, and which has its roots in the old Polish United Workers Party, but has a policy programme identical to most social democratic parties in Europe - has decided to shift leftwards, in a desperate attempt to get some of its old support back.

The row with the Democratic Party included two issues: the anti-missile shield in Poland - which SLD opposes but the PD is for - and Poland’s restrictive abortion laws, which PD are for keeping pretty much as they are, and SLD wants to liberalise.

Where have all the voters gone?

Much of the left in Poland is saddled with the yoke of their history - they were in the communist party. So many of the more liberal Poles, like my girlfriend, would never vote for them even if they agree with their programme. Sje is not going to vote for people who made her mum’s life difficult because she, as a school teacher, had the cheek to refuse to join the Party.

Their second problem is that, on the economic redistribution issue that should be on any left or left of centre party’s agenda, there are many parties trampling on this ground. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party relies on much of its support from poorer Poles. The Polish Peasant’s Party, now in government with Thatcherite conservatives, have always positioned themselves on the redistributionist left. So do the now out-of-parliament Self defence and League of Polish Families.

The third problem is that too many of these guys have links with corrupt rich people who got their hands on the goodies in the wake of the fall of communism. This tends to have very bad consequences for trust scores in focus groups.

So the secular Left finds itself making and then breaking alliances, chasing smaller and smaller amounts of voters. Poland needs a strong secular left/social democratic party, which could slot into the populist areas possessed at the moment by Kaczynski and other conservatives.

The problem is, the country doesn’t seem to trust the ex-communist left to deliver that politics.

And making and breaking LiD alliances between SDLP , SLD, UP and PD is going to do nothing other than alienate the dyslexic vote.

Polish president PiSed?

Should the President of Poland renew his AA membership? And no, I don’t mean the Automobile Association. And does anybody care?

Well, the ruling Civic Platform’s Janusz Palikot (above) does. The MP with the big fortune - worth 333 million zlotys according to Wprost magazine - and the big hair, has also got a big bee in his bonnet about whether President Lech the duck Kaczynski has got a drink problem.

It all started with a post on Palikot’s blog - all MPs have blogs these days, in their desperate attempt to ‘connect’ with the people - where he demanded that the President publish a detailed record of his health due to concern that the head of state has a drink problem.

He later apologised for his remark about the alcohol but repeated a demand for a record of the president’s health be made public.

That was back in January. In February, the court in Lublin declared that there ‘was a lack of public interest’ in pursuing the case in a libel court.

Well, indeed. But the matter still seems to be consuming the political and media class here (when the same people are not, many of them, consuming vast amounts of alcohol. Show me a journalist that doesn’t drink and I will show you a blue hippopotamus wearing patent leather stilettos).

Law and Justice (PiS) MPs, the party from which Kaczynski hails from, have been getting very upset about the whole business. One of them, on TV last night, stormed out of a TVN studio mid interview, so incensed was he at the allegations that there was something wrong with ‘his President.’

Palikot has remained on the offensive about a subject of dubious importance. If Kaczynski isn’t an alcoholic then maybe “he has Alzheimer’s” is the type of comment he comes out with.

Kaczynski does pop into hospital quite often. We also know he likes a drink. In one meeting with Prime Minister Tusk they got through half a case of wine between them and advisors. But does that make him a lush? He doesn’t speak very clearly, but then neither does his twin brother Jarsolaw. And the nearest Jaroslaw gets to the good times, apparently, is a plate of scrambled eggs.

There is an expression, He drinks like a fish, but is there an expression, He drinks like a duck? And is the reason for the President's dithering and incompetence down to booze?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions then maybe you should stop drinking so much.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943

As April 19 falls on Passover this year, the ceremonies commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising are being held today.

In town was Shimon Peres - the only Israeli president anyone has ever heard of. Israeli presidents are like Irish presidents: they could have been in the job five years and the first you hear of them is when they are resigning, or fighting another election. Peres took part in the long, solemn ceremony at the Monument to Ghetto Heroes, in the Muranow district, just to the north of the centre of the capital.

I used to live in that area and the ‘Jewish quarter’ doesn’t feel very Jewish anymore. No Jews there anymore. There are a few reminders of the past - a street named after the founder of Esperanto, Ludvic Zamanhof, for instance. The Nozyk Synagogue survived the war - the Nazis used it for storage space. A small part of the wall. Even the Monument to Ghetto Heroes on Zamenhofa Street is quit modest, surrounded by nasty 1950s apartment blocks.

In fact, so unlike how it was - as are most places in Warsaw - that when they filmed Polanski’s The Pianist, they didn’t shoot it in Moranow, they shot it across the river in the Praga district. See the scene on ljhjblaApril 19 from the film here.

President Peres is here till Thursday, and then the current Polish-Israeli fest will be over.

Cunning linguists

Digital Polish language channel TVN Lingua has bought two seasons of the UK version of Big Brother as an example of English as a ‘living language’.

One of the housemates to feature in the programmes is Jade Goody. Jade became a Big Star in Britain because of her Big Brother appearances; so big, in fact, that she was invited back for last year’s Celebrity Big Brother.
Unfortunately, Goody was thrown out of the house after a bizarre dispute with Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty (video example here - Jade is the one in glasses)

So what kind of ‘living English’ can TVN Lingua viewers expect from Our Jade? Well, here are some of the quotes that got her in trouble during last year’s Celebrity BB. To Bollywood star Shetty, on Celebrity Big Brother, January 2007:

You're a fucking loser and a liar. Go back to the slums.

You're not some princess in fucking Neverland. I don't give a shit. You're not some princess here.

Your head's so far up your arse you can smell your own shit…

And so on. But what use would Goody and the rest of the housemates be to Poland’s aspiring linguists? The Guardian UK:

Urszula Majewska, the chief executive of the Polish TVN Lingua channel, said the programme was an ideal way to show how English was actually spoken, but admitted that she "wouldn't recommend it for teenagers".

Well, quite. BTW, Urszula Majewska’s qualifications for being chief executive of a TV channel rests only, I am informed, with the fact that she was once personal assistant to head of TVN Mariusz Walter and is a graduate of English Studies at Warsaw University.

Oh, and once TVN Lingua viewers get the hang of Goody’s ‘living language’ then maybe they can stay up for the adult show Zabawy z jezyczkiem…which is a play on language meaning either’ Play with language’ or…‘Play with the tongue’.

I see TVN really is full of cunning linguists.

Dull old Warsaw?

Warsaw has been voted third most boring European capital.

The survey by tripadvisor.com from a sample of 1700 travellers put excruciatingly dull Brussels as most soporific European city, followed by the deathly dull Zurich. Warsaw staggers in third.

The survey has odd aspects, however. London, for instance, is simultaneously voted third most friendly European capital, but second most unfriendly European capital.

Go figure.

Poles in Israel

Did you know that there are around 100,000 non-Jewish Poles resident in Israel?

That is what the government press briefing before Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s visit to Israel this week said.

In fact, one of Tusk’s ports of call in Israel today was to meet representatives - they even have ‘representatives’, so they must be a ‘community’ - along, of course, with the many hundreds of thousands of Jewish-Poles who have made the ‘holy land’ their home since the Holocaust, communist inspired repressions and the occasional outbreak of general, hostile prejudice in Poland.

But the real task for Tusk has been to improve Poland’s image in Israel and beyond.

I have argued before that no matter the government in Poland, these days, relations with Israel are a priority. Warsaw likes to paint itself as ‘Israel’s friend in Europe’- which is code for saying that ‘yes’, other European countries support those poor oppressed, occupied Palestinians, whereas Warsaw supports Israel, just like the US - but relations with Israel also serve to show the rest of the world that the stereotype of the anti-Semitic Pole is just that - a stereotype. Israel gives Polish diplomacy a purpose and a vehicle for Poland to re-invent itself.

So maybe this is why the rumoured visit by the Polish prime minister to the West Bank as well - and the government was certainly pondering such a visit to the Palestinian Authority as late as week, I understand - was decided against. Palestinians in themselves are not materially useful to Poland. They got no economy at all. But diplomatically it might have sent the right signals to the rest of the Arab world that ‘Warsaw was listening, Warsaw understands’. With Poland being open about its wish for oil deposits in Iraq (the ‘blood for oil’ anti-war slogan actually works in Poland’s case) a little soothing of the Arab brow will never go amiss. But the government must have calculated that a purer message to Jerusalem was a better bet.

Or the chaos of the West Bank and Gaza may have just exhausted the planning.

Prime Minister Olmert said that he would like to visit Poland 'sometime this year’, at the presser after the meeting between the two PMs today.

For Donald Tusk, visiting Israel has been way up the list of countries to be seen in since coming to power late last year. After all, he hasn’t been abroad that much since. But I wonder what there is in Poland - apart from export/import markets - for the Israelis? Apart, that is, from Warsaw’s Washington style support.

Putin puts the boot in - part 666

Ukraine and Georgia’s bid to join Nato, and the anti-missile shield, which the Czech side have now signed up to and the Polish side appears close, are bringing out the beast in Vladimir Putin, as his days as president near an end.

According to the Russian daily Kommiersant, last Friday in Bucharest, President Putin said that if Ukraine and Georgia ever do become full Nato members then Russia would have every right to take back part of Ukraine, the Crimea and the Georgian breakaway states of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia!

If the German and French side were having doubts about accepting Ukraine and Georgia into the first stage of Nato membership, the Membership Action Plan - and Paris and Berlin were - then that must have settled it. Both the ex-Soviet countries were told by Nato leaders that yes, they would be asked to join the North Atlantic alliance, but not now. Not yet.

Game and set to Putin.

Unfortunately, Nato also endorsed the US plan for an anti-missile system in Central Europe.

Game and second set to George W. Bush.

Today, in a meeting between deputy foreign minsters of Poland and Russia, Moscow demanded that if Poland should host their portion of the anti-missile system then Russia must have full access to the facility.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, confirmed this demand.

‘Our constant presence at those sites is of key importance to us, so that we know at every second that the radar is not penetrating our territory and interception rockets do not pose a threat to us. Lavrov was quoted as saying in the Kremlin’s Komsomolskaya Pravda’ newspaper.

Not surprisingly, the Polish side said ‘No’.

‘Certainly, there is no way that Russians should be granted the right to be stationed in Poland. That belongs in the past and will never come back,’ said Polish deputy foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski.

It’s hard to know how much of this is hard-ball bluff and how much of it Russia expects to be taken seriously. Demanding constant access to a facility in Poland surly must come under the slightly daft bluff. But what about Moscow’s threat to break up Ukraine ?

That one is a little more complicated as a majority of Ukrainians don’t want to be in Nato. Around half of Ukrainians don’t speak Ukrainian as a first language, but Russian. How unified a nation is Ukraine in the first place?

Whatever - if Moscow thinks that these kind of antics, in the fag end of Putin’s presidency, and on the cusp of his new job as prime minister, will make the anti-missile shield less popular in Poland then…well, they are wrong. They are actually helping Warsaw get more dollars out of Washington to beef up its armed forces in return for babysitting Bush’s anti-missile shield.

Polandian round up

Some recent posts from the new collaborative blog on Poland, Polandian.

Darthsida has a provocative little post about why he does not, has not, will not, donate to Poland’s one real charity fest, The Great Orchestra of Holiday Aid…or whatever.

I could argue it’s not Owsiak [Jerzy, creator of the charity marathon] with his levee en masse to cover some gaps in the health system. I pay taxes for the system, why should I pay more? Paying through another channel is through the nose. The similar logic (which, a steadfast dog hater, I only heard of) – would be in use by dog owners. They say one of the reasons they don’t collect their pets’ droppings is that they (humans) pay the relevant tax. The money should include remuneration for cleaning persons to go and remove doggie deeds done dirt cheap…

He’s got a point = although I don’t clear up Lucy’s poop because, well, it’s nasty. And to follow darthsida’s logic, taxes would be even higher if we did not have charity - with voluntary donations - to pick up the slack (and man, are Polish public services ‘slack’).

Scatts picks up the tax theme and the filling out the scary PIT tax forms, which the nation has just completed.

Popular belief is that if you don’t do this you will be banged up in the nearest prison or have your head removed and displayed on a pole outside the nearest U.S office. At any rate, the consequences are said to be dire and so nobody has ever bothered trying.

I think a few have tried, however. In fact, tax fraud is huge in Poland, as everywhere else.

Pawel rights about Poland’s colonial relationship with …Madagascar!?

Polish settlers have stayed in Madagascar, however, and Polish minority today is the second largest minority in after the French. During communist period Polish community in Madagascar supported the Polish mainland with tropical fruits - a fact that is still remembered in Poland.

We should also remember Poland’s role in the Madagascar Plan. Lest we forget.

And Scatts reminds us that Queen - the band - will be playing Gdansk Shipyard in September. No, they will not be resurrecting Fred to sing vocals, they got that bloke from free to do the singing, and will be releasing a brand new album of tunes to go with the tour.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski...

...Cookie Monster?

He’s been likened to a potato before, and much worse, besides. Now, former PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski will forever be known as the muppet of Polish politics.

Apparently, last Sunday, PM Donald Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski were locked in 5 hours of difficult negotiations over the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Unlike his bulldog brother, Lech gets on a little with Tusk. Lech is generally seen as not the brighter of the two twins, but the more humane...or do I mean human?

Just then the phone rang for Lech, who went to take the call from his brother, Jaroslaw.

Tusk was heard to say to one of his aids: “It’s the monster on the phone.”

When asked today about this remark, the Prime Minister said:” Well, if he is a monster, then he’s the Cookie Monster!”

Polish politicians have always resembled muppets to me. But I wonder if you can guess which Polish politician is which muppet. I’ll give you a start. Donald Tusk and....

Gonzo!

Olympian boycott bores and other Chinese crackers

Prime Minister Donald Tusk last week became the first EU leader to declare that he will not be attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games this summer. So what is he expecting from the rest of us – a gold medal?

The EU representation at the opening ceremony is going to be patchy: UK’s PM Gordon Brown has declared that he will be going – while Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that she will not. In fact, the Guardian puts it thus:

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, yesterday became the first world leader to decide not to attend the Olympics in Beijing... [...] Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

I bet Tusk is smarting that he is only the first ‘EU head of government’ to boycott, while Merkel is the first ‘world leader’.

Read more of this post here.

April Fools

After a protracted battle over the second reading of the Lisbon Treaty Ratification Bill, the Polish Lower House has voted to send it to the Senate and then to the President.

The opposition Law and Justice, which had threatened to vote against the bill if guarantees of opt-outs a la Anglais from the Fundamental Rights Charter, plus maintaining Poland’s blocking mechanism in case they didn’t like some Euro-legislation, in the end, was all a load of hot air.

The Prime Minister Tusk went to the President at the weekend and emerged with what is basically an informal compromise.

Law and Justice then withdrew their amendments to the Bill and voted it through this afternoon.

The opposition to the bill has come from nationalists and from the Left. The government is a Thatcher-ite bunch of rightwingers. What’s different about their politics from Lady Thatcher’s, however, is commitment to, and enthusiasm, of Brussels – something that would make the Old Lady barf, if she still knows how to barf, that is. You won’t find many business and Big Business people in Poland who are against the EU, and that is the government’s electoral base.

The Polish government has successfully bypassed the electorate and pushed through the Treaty without having to bother the electorate. In doing so, they have joined the other national governments within the EU, who were scared out of their tiny minds by the populist moment in French and Dutch booted the old Constitutional Treaty in to touch.

The difference between, for instance, Poland and the UK is that if out to the vote here, the government would have won a ‘Tak’ vote. All they were scared of was that the turnout would not make the 50 percent threshold for the vote to be valid.

The Polish government were scared of the apathy of the majority of the population over an issue that is indeed a distant, detached.

So I don’t think that the Eurocrats should be patting themselves too hard on the back for a ‘Yes’ vote in the Polish parliament. The Lisbon Treaty is not going to solve the problem that the original Constitutional Treaty set out to solve – the lack of real connection between Brussels and the rest of us.

Still, a Yes vote after a prolonged piece of nonsense by the political class in Poland on April Fool’s Day. Apt.

Brendan Fay in Poland

President Lech Kaczynski’s favourite married gay person, Brendan Fay, is in Poland. And he is bringing the anti-gay low life out from under their rocks.

A spokesperson for the anti-homosexual lobby in Poland was on TVN24 this morning discussing with a gay activist the visit to Warsaw of Brendan Gay and his partner - photos of whose wedding were used in a recent TV broadcast by President Lech Kaczynski, warning of how the EU Lisbon Treaty would ‘bring gay marriage to Poland…’ and other such nonsense.

Fay is here – brought to Poland by TVN TV – to meet with left wing politicians and with representatives from the Campaign Against Homophobia in Poland.

The arch-conservative activist, Joanna Najfeld, after threatening how she was going to take the 24 hour news station to court ‘for discrimination’ (we are confused as to what she meant by this) the interviewer asked her if she would shake the hand of the gay activist opposite her - Jacek Adler - with whom she was having a debate.

“No, I don’t know where his hand has been,’ was Ms Najfeld’s elegant response.

The primitivism of the anti-gay lobby here is sometimes surprising. But only sometimes.

Update - Beatroot’s Peace Be With You campaign

At Mass, when we turn to our neighbour and say ‘Peace Be With You,’ we also shake their hand.

In the spirit of tolerance, I suggest we start a new campaign, where we shake the hands of those who would not want to shake the hands of ...you know...them!

So, spot a far-righter today, and shake their hands (and then ask them how they know where your hand has been...-{).

More?
Here

Poland must give women right to choose

A parliamentary committee of the Council of Europe has recommended that all 47 states belonging to the Council should ensure legal access to abortion – and that includes Malta, Ireland, Poland and ...Andora, which at the moment, only do in very special circumstances.

The Left Democrats have supported the demand, as the equal opportunities committee of the Council of Europe puts it: “Women must be allowed freedom of choice and offered the conditions of a free and enlightened choice."

The Council of Europe, it must be remembered, is not the same thing as the European Union – even if the EU did steal its flag and anthem from the CoE. The CoE is much older than the EU and has 47, not 27 members. Russia has been a member since 1996. One of its main functions is running the European Court of Human Rights, and presides over the European Convention of Human Rights.

Though the Court is an exercise in International Law, different states have signed up to different protocol. It’s a pick and mix international law. For instance, though Article 12 of the Convention is entitled The Right to Marry, this only refers to the traditional, heterosexual variety. And in spite of several groups representing people like Brendan Fay having appealed through the Court for same sex marriages to be recognised, the Council holds that individual states have room for maneuver over that kind of issue.

And same goes for issues like abortion and the right to choose.

Poland has found itself in trouble with the Court of Human Rights over an abortion issue before. The ruling, which went against Poland, found that despite a right to an abortion in Poland if the mother’s health be seriously threatened, no legal means was available to Alicja Tysiac.

So a general ruling on abortion for member states to follow is not probable, though individual rulings do occur often. The parliamentary committee can’t change the constitution of the Council, so Poland will not have to change its law.

But the resolution by a parliamentary committee comes at a great time for Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party, who are battling over the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in parliament, warming that gay marriages, abortion - and satanic rituals compulsory in all Tesco’s supermarkets every Sunday morning between 10 and 11 a.m. – will be coming through Poland’s now open border to a small farm somewhere near YOU!

Quite what the Council of Europe does will be obscured from many of us, and its use is dubious. For Poles to win the right to choose they are going to have to fight for it at home, not in Strasbourg. And Russia is in the Council of Europe. So what about the Rights? But the Council of Europe has raised the question of sovereignty, at a time of sudden and heated battle in the parliament over Lisbon, the EU and sovereignty.

Gay marriage guy gets Polish apology

News coming on the beatroot radar that the Polish Consulate in New York has just apologised to Brendan Fay, the gay guy who complained about use of his image in the recent ant-homo TV rant by President Lech Kaczynski.

The Consulate has said that Poland apologises for the ‘regretful incident.’

Brendan Fay – an Irish immigrant to North America, and, poetically, a resident in the Queens area of the Big Apple – is accepting the apology.

Expect this story to be all over the pink press. Kaczynski has a record of daft, and worse, comments and actions against gay people. He has now been hoist by his own stupidity.

White Boots Poland

It’s the social trend, even a sub culture, that the sociologists have yet to acknowledge: the rise of Polish White Boots Girrrl.

I don’t know which web site you click to first thing – your favourite news site, game site, social networking site, porn site, horoscope site, gambling site, the beatroot...but me – I click to the site that is not just a sartorial chronicle, but an observer of social trends in Poland.

The site tracks photographically (mostly on dodgy mobile phone cameras) a spectacle that stalks, almost literally, our not so green and pleasant Polish land.

You know and love blondynka, the dumb Polish dyed blond equivalent of Essex Girl in the UK – and how we laughed at all those jokes. ‘What do you call an Essex Girl with half a brain? Gifted!’

How we did. Indeed. Chuckle


Well now let me introduce you to White Boots Girl.

She can appear anywhere – but her favourite place is at the shopping mall. White Boots Girl can be spotted, of course, because of her conspicuous white boots and her conspicuous love of consumption. The boots are usually accompanied by the same, chemical looking orange skin - the result, maybe, of either a daily roasting at the solarium, or, perhaps, from the leftover bottles of blonde hair dye...

Since I found this site I notice White Boots Girl everywhere. When I see a pair walking down the street the sound track I hear in my head is usually by Disco Polo Queen Shazza.

Soon, as her numbers grow, we will hear the same jokes about White Boot Girl as we used to endure about Blondynka, or Essex Girl.

What unites Essex Girl, Blondynka and White Boots Girl is that they are usually not the best educated, but have a little money – and man, are they going to show you they spend it.

And I think that’s good. It means money is starting to liberate poorer Poles. The reason why we laugh at White Boots Girl is because we want to maintain our superiority over them. Those working class oiks, chavs, rednecks, who dare to dangle their cash in front of our faces.

How uncouth.

But to me that is just another reason to lerve White Boots Girl. See the site (updated daily) of which I speak here. It will change your surfing habits forever.

Playing the homo-bogeyman card

In their new found zeal to get opt out amendments into the EU Lisbon Treaty currently going through the Polish Parliament, Lech, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and co have raised the specter that is haunting...well, not Europe, but the fantasies of the main opposition party – Brussels is going to force gay marriages on Poland!

Aaaaaaghhhh...gurgle...pop!

Despite voting, with only just over fifty against, for the first reading of the Lisbon Treaty Ratification Bill, the Polish parliament has rocked with bitter arguments over amendments tabled by the Law and Justice party, demanding British style opt outs from the Fundamental Rights Charter, which guarantees certain rights throughout the EU.

Law and Justice, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski – who has realised that his party have some power over the issue as the government needs some of his MPs to vote with them to get the bill through parliament and onto the table of the President – have also, rather bizarrely, demanded the preamble to the old Constitutional Treaty be put back in.

It was this preamble on universal European values which caused so much trouble to Brussels last time and has now been ditched by nervous Eurocrats and governments desperate to get the now renamed ‘Lisbon Treaty’ quietly through national legislators.

Party political broadcast on behalf of the lame duck party

Last night, President Lech Kaczynski went on two public TV channels (a very good argument for privatisation of both of them, if you ask me) and made what was, in essence, a party political broadcast in favour of the opposition. Against sentimental music from a 1970s Polish TV series, he warned, darkly, that the Lisbon Treaty would open up Poland to Germans wanting back property confiscated after WW II.

The Lisbon Treaty would also bring ‘homosexual marriages’ to Poland, says the Prez. As he said this a clip of video came on showing two men getting married (photo).

Unfortunately, it was a film of two Canadian men getting married, not Europeans. Oops! And one of the men has complained to the Polish ambassador in Canada about his image being used in anti-homosexual propaganda. Double oops!

PM Donald Tusk has called Kaczynski’s antics ‘anti-European’. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski was in parliament this morning reading out bits of the treaty which guarantee that social legislation, such as abortion or gay marriage, will be left, as it is now, to national parliaments to decide.

But no matter – here is an issue where Law and Justice can consolidate its more nationalist electoral base and relive the good old days when they had some power over public life.

So the Kaczynskis playing the ‘gay card’ was pathetically predictable. All the more pathetic when you realise that the Lisbon Treaty, which governments signed back in December, was supported back then by one President Lech Kaczynski, who is now saying he will veto the bill if he thinks that Poland will lose its sovereignty over certain issues – such as banning gay civil unions.

So why support the treaty in the first place then, Lech?

The government has threatened new elections if Law and Justice continue to obstruct the bill. Law and Justice would be annihilated in such a poll. And today there was also a suggestion that a referendum would be called if the bill is blocked, a move supported by the Left Democrats – and this blog, for that matter. Should idiots such as the above be able to decide these things?

Asia loves Papaya

The whole of southeast Asia – from Japan to Malaysia, that kind of thing – has fallen in love with a song recorded by a Polish jazz singer in the mid 1970s.

Actually, what they love is the remix version of Urszula Dudziak’s Papaya (1976). It’s as big in the Philippines at the moment as was Macarena all over Europe in the mid 1990s.

See how Asia loves Papaya here. What you have to remember is that many Philippinos think that Urszula is singing in Polish...

Are you a sex addict alcoholic?

Well, if you are reading this then you are, according to former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Bless.

Plans by the government to introduce voting via the internet have alarmed Jaroslaw. He thinks that anyone who hangs around on the web is a deviant.

On his Law and Justice party web site Kaczynski says: “I am not an enthusiast of the idea that a young person can sit in front of a computer, watching movies and pornography, drinking beer, and then vote when he feels like it. The act of voting should be serious, conscious and demanding some activity.”

Are you a drunken sex maniac?

But I agree. Politics should be about engagement. But someone should get Jaroslaw a communications director and stop him making statements so dumb. He reflects the small town view here among the many not connected, that the internet is the devil incarnate.

They have heard stories, but have never used the web. Internet reach is limited in Poland. And those folk are Kaczynski's political base. They will ignore the positive benefits for many workers – like disabled people who can now work from home, and demonstrated by callers to the TVN 24 news station today, outraged at being called drunken alcoholics by Kaczynski.

The present Donald Tusk government has been scratching its head (and considering this government is not the most active in the history of governments, probably picking and flicking its collective nose) about how to increase turnout at election time in Poland. If over fifty three percent turn out for election time (as they did in the last election in October last year) then that is seen as a ‘success’. Poles, many of them, are not amazed by democracy.

And the reasons for low turnout - which is connected with the collapse of meaningful politics - will not be tackled simply by a click on a mouse.

Al Gore in Warsaw

Yes, the world’s favourite eco-warrior was in Warsaw this week to collect an award given by the Confederation of Polish Employers.

The business club gave the Super Vector Award to the failed presidential candidate (he failed to beat George Bush let’s remember: anyone who can muster up a loss to that chump is not fit to be president in the first place) for ‘facts and figures regarding the threats to the global climate, but avoided a moralising tone.[?]’

I think they must have seen a different film than I did. Even Gore has said that global warming is not a political question but a ‘moral question’ – and the film was incredibly finger-waggingly moralising throughout.

And he spent a lot of time banging on about ‘The Science’. But, and this is an inconvenient truth, it has since been pointed out that his ‘science’ is not all that it could be.

Quite why a group of Polish businessmen would want to give Gore an award is quite strange when you think about it. Gore, when he becomes world president, will put such environmental tax on business (and customers) that will make their eyes water. So why would capitalists want that kind of burden?

Maybe it is because if a company can ‘look green’ it does their brand the (globally warming) world of good, and covers up the fact that their products are not developing quite so fast as their eco-profile. Can the green movement have given the brand industry a boost? Not only have Greens saved the polar bear but they have also given nasty big business a nice little side-line in building up their green credentials.

Polish PM – ‘Are you pleased to see me...

...or is that an anti-missile system in your pocket?' (photo: Gazeta.pl)

George W. Bush met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the Whitehouse today and...well...nothing happened that we did not know already.

The US will come up with a package for butching up the Polish armed forces to such a degree that the Polish government can claim they ‘really are protecting Polish security.’

Oh, and as Bush said, there will still be no visa waiver program for Poland.

So was it worth the trip by PM Tusk? He did try to reduce costs: he travelled to see Uncle Sam not in the Polish version of ‘Air Force One’...but on a scheduled Polish LOT airline to New York. Shame then that there was a hoax bomb threat that prevented the aircraft from touching down for nearly an hour.

If I was Tusk, I’d revise my travel plans.

Lisbon Treaty – what are they scared of?

Polish and British governments are bulldozing the Constitutional, Reform, Lisbon Treaty thing through parliament, ignoring the elephants in the room – their respective electorates.

If the political class of Europe is so confident of the EU project then why have they become so allergic to having referenda on the issue?

On February 28, the Sejm, the Polish parliament, voted to ratify the Lisbon Treaty by 357 votes to 55 with 7 abstentions. That’s virtually unanimous – a very rare collusion of politicians in Poland.

The Civic Platform led government does not want a referendum on this issue, and does not want the EU to be a political issue in general, as it was under the Kaczynski government.

So, a treaty that shifts and confuses the meaning of sovereignty even more than it has already become will not be put before the people. Tusk would probably win a ‘yes’ vote, though the necessary 50 percent turnout to validate the referendum would be a problem, so crushingly dull and irrelevant is much of the document to most Poles.

Brown-nosing Brussels

But Tusk never pretended to be keen on a referendum. He never led his voters to expect anything else. The same cannot be said of the UK PM, Gordon Brown. New Labour had promised a referendum on the original Constitutional Treaty, which got flushed down the toilet after the Dutch and French votes.

When practically the same document re-emerged as the ‘Lisbon Treaty’ Brown said that since the treaty was no longer a ‘constitution’ then he didn’t have to have a referendum on it. Brilliant!

And last week Gordon Brown’s brown-nosing New Labour MPs went along with the deceit, with only a handful voted against or abstained to ratify the EU Constitution Treaty dressed in Portuguese drag.

I think that Poles, the British and most Europeans are being held in contempt by their political class. There are serious issues involved in the Lisbon Treaty and we should have the right to a direct say in the decision making process.

The EU, from the very beginnings in the 1950s, has always been a project of European political elites. I don’t ever remember people marching through the streets demanding a department in Brussels set up to measure the size of people’s letter boxes (there is directives about this; I just got a new EU letter box! The bit you put the letters in must be within certain parameters...and should not be made of Genetically Modified products made in China). I don’t remember people chaining themselves to the railings demanding the Common Agricultural Policy. From the Coal and Steel act in the 1950s onwards, these ideas have come from political elites, not from social movements. The gap between Brussels and its ‘people’ has always been wide as a result.

One of the ideas behind the EU Constitution was to find a way to bind people closer to Brussels – to find, create a relationship and identity with society. But as long as national governments continue to stick a finger up at their electorates over EU matters, by-passing them on the road to ratifying the Lisbon Treaty then those Euro-elites are never going to get touchy-feely with me or anyone else.

Give us a referendum! What are you so scared of?

John Cleese, Polish loans and ZA GERMANS!

An advert in Poland for bank loans featuring ex-Python John Cleese has caused a bit of a fuss. Cleese managed not to mention the war in the ad, but he did mention the Germans. Cue lights, camera...controversy.

The advert made the evening news a couple of days ago and everyone seems to have an opinion about it.

The ad – for Bank Zachodni WBK S.A, whose major share holder these days is Allied Irish – features Cleese in a television studio in Poland preparing to film an advert and talking to the director how he would like one of these loans (how very Po Mo).

See the ad here. (it's in English).

The controversy comes from the last line, obviously, when Cleese, desperately wanting a cheap loan from BZ WBK bank, says: “But I can speak Polish: Guten Morgen!”

Titter, titter.

An attention grabbing, but not very funny advert, all in all, and very typical of John Cleese’s career over the past three decades. After the amazing success of Fawlty Towers – made in the mid 1970s, let’s remember – he all but gave up on comedy and started writing books and making films on cod-psychology. He is also a famous money whore, frequently making not that good adverts which trade on a time when the guy was one of the most talented comedy writers and performers Britain has ever produced.

The Polish bank advert references perhaps the most famous of Fawlty Towers episodes – ‘The Germans’, where Basil, disorientated from a bang on the head when he was putting a moose’s head up on the wall under strict orders from his purple hared, parana fish of a wife, Cybil, is confronted by a group of German guests at his ‘hotel’. The catch phrase, “Don’t mention the war,’ and the famous goose stepping have entered British comedy folklore.

Listening to people talk about it today at work, the problem appears to be that: “You see, most Poles don’t know Fawlty Towers and just find the advert insulting.”

So, because ‘most Poles feel insulted’ by the advert it therefore must be a bad advert.

The truth is a little different. Any advert that can make it onto the evening news – and an advert using subtitles, at that, with no horrid Polish voice over, like most things on the television here - is a very good advert, indeed. It was probably focus grouped, as most ads are these days, on the target group that the bank hoped would be their future customers. The focus group gave it the green light.

They probably calculated the type of people who might feel insulted by this – the old, the nationalist, the Kaczynski, Lepper, Giertych supporting Radio Maryja listening, mohair beret wearer, maybe – was not the type of person who might be coming to the bank for a loan in the first place. After all, former PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski infamously has never had a bank account and gets his mum to look after dosh for him. So any controversy that did result would just be more free air time for the advert.

The added twist to it all is that the Basil Fawlty character was a satire on what we call in Britain ‘Little Englanders’...those lower middle class, Daily Mail reading, xenophobic conservatives who are now aghast at the amount of Poles currently living and working in the UK. So a Polish equivalent of Basil getting upset about a slightly deranged Torquay hotel owning Little Englander will not be much of a problem for Bank Zachodni WBK S.A..

The Polish 68-ers

The Shalom Foundation in Warsaw wants tens of thousands of Jews who were expelled from Poland in 1968 after the communist inspired anti-Semitic campaign of that year to regain Polish citizenship.

Commemorations of what happened that year will take place on March 5.

The Communists took away Polish passports and gave Jews a one-way ticket, usually to Austria, where most went on to reside in Israel.

In 2006, when President Lech Kaczynski was in Israel trying to mend difficult relations between the two countries over the decades, promised that any Jewish Pole who wanted their citizenship back could have it, ‘as if they had never been away’.

Problem is – it isn’t in the president’s power to give back their passports. The local authorities, as I understand it, have that privilage, and many are not too keen. Giving back their citizenship would also give them back property rights. Israelis are also none too pleased about having to go through a rigorous procedure that many see as demeaning.

1968 – the year that rocked

Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the year that rocked the world – available in Polish and English language bookshops - unravels the connections between the revolutionary events of that year in Paris, Prague, America and Poland.

Like 1945 or 1989, 1968 is one of those years that are seen as pivotal to the history of the 20th century.

We were only one year away from the first human being walking on the moon. It was a time of civil rights and anti-war protests, of new and inventive music and sub-cultures, of scientific and social experiment. A very different time, then, from the one we live in today, characterized as it is by aversion to risk and a fear of the new.

The motor of this movement for social change were young, mostly middle class sons and daughters of the old ruling elites. It was a time when students were concentrating more of sit-ins and love-ins than they were on their study-ins. It was a time of hallucinogenic drugs, which my granny used to tell me made one want to jump from the top of multi-story car parks in the mistaken impression that one was an albatross.

Most people, except perhaps the most historically challenged, will have heard of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Abie Hoffman in the US; or in France, Henri Comte and Jean Paul Satire; or in the Czechoslovak capital, the students and Alexander Dubcek. All over the world, ruling elites had lost their legitimacy and were under pressure.

But few in the West have heard of the names associated with events in Poland of that year: Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik…

Radical theatre

In Warsaw, it all started with an evening at the theatre. The Polish National Theatre decided to stage a new radical interpretation of Dziady. – which is sometimes translated in English as Forefathers’ Eve – by Poland’s most celebrated poet, Adam Mickiewicz. The play, written in the early nineteenth century, tells the story of Polish political prisoners under czarist Russia. As well as a being a political play it is also interpreted by theatre and literary critics as being a mystical, religious piece of work.

The communists had no problem with the political content, but they weren’t too keen on all the religious stuff, which had undertones of a pre-communist Poland they would rather people forgot. They saw this version of the play as being subtly subversive, and with a stupidity characteristic of the regime, decided that they were going to ban it.

On the last night of the performance, about 300 students from Warsaw University picketed outside the theatre and then marched through the center of town in protest. They were met by police and so-called workers-militia (who were basically a bunch of thugs) who beat them up and the police arrested anyone trying to get away from them.

The next day thousands of students joined in the demonstrations on the university campus, refused to go to classes, called for more freedom of expression and held sit-ins outside the Dean’s office, just as they had seen American students do on television. Before long, students from other universities had joined the struggle. All were met by the workers militias, and were beaten and arrested.

These protests had a similar character to those in Paris, or New York; mostly middle class kids from good homes, connected to parents who were part of the establishment. Another thing that the leaders of these protests had in common was that many of them were Jewish.

But in Poland, as ever, there was an extra twist.

Scapegoats

The communist party in the late sixties was divided into two factions: those who had fled Poland as the Nazis invaded, or lived in areas in the east of the country grabbed by Stalin in 1939. Many of these people were taken to the gulags, only to team up with the Soviet army as a way of freeing themselves from Stalin’s grip. Many, maybe not surprisingly, were Jews. The other group, more nationalist in their outlook – the self-styled Partisans – came from communist cells within the underground movement, who fought the Nazis from within Poland.

Many of the ‘Partisans’ were anti-Semites and wanted to get rid of Jews from the party, who they accused of being ‘Zionists’. Remember, 1968 came just a year after the Israeli-Arab conflict, in which Moscow sided with the Arab states – the losing side.

Jews in Poland had become communism’s scapegoats. And with many sons and daughters of Jewish members of the party taking part in the student protests, the opportunity for an anti-Jewish purge was just too tempting to be turned down.

The ‘Partisans’ organized counter-demonstrations, leading chants such as: “Zionists go back to Zion.” Unfortunately, the mob that the party had assembled were simple folk who had never even heard of Zionism. In fact, they thought that the militias were shouting, “Siamists go back to Siam”, and chanted along with gusto.

Yul Brynner would have been proud of them.

Meanwhile, the communist regime had given most of Poland’s remaining Jews one-way tickets to the West, stripping them of their passports.

Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik and many of the other protest leaders were arrested again and thrown in jail. The demonstrations gradually ran out of steam, and a potentially dangerous ‘counter-revolutionary’ movement was snuffed out.

One of the failures of the demos in Poland, as elsewhere, was that the intellectuals failed to make connections with the workers. It was only when, in the late 1970’s, intellectuals such as Kuron connected up with workers such as Lech Welasa that the opposition movement really gained steam. And that is why the name of Solidarity was chosen for the first independent trade union in the communist bloc: it was a solidarity between workers and intellectuals – two parts of Polish society that were finally, and mutually, dependant on each other.

In the book, 1968, the year that rocked the world, American journalist, Mark Kurlansky tells this story well, and captures the spirit of adventure that was so characteristic among university students all over the world back in 1968.

Fast forward to today and look at the university students. Do you see that same idealistic, brave, adventurist spirit? If you do, then maybe you have been ingesting some of those chemicals that granny said make you want to jump off the roof of multi-story car parks.

New blog on Poland online

Polandian is a new collaborative site by bloggers writing in the English language about Poland.

As you can see I am down as one of the bloggers included. But due to having no time or energy at all for even more writing at the moment I have not had time to add anything as yet, and my contributions will be infrequent.

Still, give it a try – it’s really rather good.