Prime Minister
Jarosław Kaczyński told us at the memorable rally at Gdańsk Shipyard, 'We stand where we stood then. They stand where the ZOMO stood'.
How easily Mr Kaczyński put on one side with the riot police people like
Lech Wałęsa and Władysław Frasyniuk, Zbyszek Bujak and
Bogdan Lis,
Bogdan Borusewicz and Tadeusz Mazowiecki,
Bronisław Geremek and Władysław Bartoszewski.
How easy it was for Mr Kaczyński to resort to this indecent language that equals distinguished and wise, honest and courageous, people with armed riot policemen protecting the power of a military junta.
This is how the head of government spoke, and these lies, insults, and calumnies were then repeated by his loyal political praetorians: politicians and stage artists, journalists and writers. It was a lamentable show. Calumny and provocation have had great two years in Poland.
During these two years I smelled incessantly the all-too-familiar stench of baseness that I learned to recognise around 1968, and then, all over again, during the regime's campaign against the Worker Defence Committee, or KOR, in the late 1970s, or, later, during the martial law era of slanderous attacks against the underground Solidarity. But even then I knew that calumny had not been introduced to the Polish national tradition by the communists, that it was an older, time-honoured tradition.
The Other Tradition 'In few nations', Ksawery Prószyński wrote in 1943, 'has calumny had such a terrible power. You need to read not the bland set texts of school but the works of Konopczyński and Korzon to see the extent to which the Polish "public opinion" of another time condemned through the mouths of its pompous mediocrities the Constitution of May 3, and how terribly many supporters the Targowica had in this infallible view. Calumny in Poland whips Kołłątaj and reaches Kościuszko, calumny slanders Prince Józef, calumny chases Czartoryski and Lelewel, Mierosławski and Wielopolski, Borzyński and Daszyński. I leave aside Szczęsny Potocki and Ksawery Branicki, General Zajączek, hundreds of mediocrities, thousands of miscreants, and countless scoundrels.'
Things hardly got better after Poland regained her independence. 'Those who remember those times', Prószyński wrote, 'know that a significant part of the public kept repeating in best faith that "Piłsudski didn't want to defend Lviv", while "respectable and serious" citizens swore (on their honour, as always) that he had stolen the Polish kings' crowns from the city of Vladimir. At the moment when Tukhachevsky's armies were advancing to the suburbs of Warsaw, the Polish public lent credence to claims that there was a secret telephone hotline between the Belvedere and the Soviet headquarters. Korfanty, the man who secured Silesia for Poland, was kicked around, morally and physically, was accused of planning to separate the same Silesia from Poland, was not allowed to return to the country even for the funeral of his own son. And when he did return at the time when war was already looming, the terminally ill man was imprisoned again.
The vilest of all vile crimes, the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz, did not take place without the public playing its part either. The shot that was fired at Poland's first president at Warsaw's Zachęta gallery did not happen out of the blue, nor was it conceived in a madman's head. It was begotten in the course of a protracted, persistent, skilful, stubborn, meticulous smear campaign in the press. A smear campaign so perfectly organised as this domestic form of terror, of inquisition, can only be organised in Poland'.
In other words, besides the Polish record of liberty and tolerance that we are so proud of, there has always existed, and sometimes dominated, a tradition of intolerance and calumny. Like a long gloomy shadow, it accompanied that which was best, most interesting, and most noble in our intellectual life.
Patriotic Slur Several months after Narutowicz's assassination, on July 3, 1923, Józef Piłsudski made a memorable speech in the Raspberry Room of Bristol Hotel. He said, 'There was a shadow that ran besides me - ahead of me sometimes, at times behind me. There were many such shadows, surrounding me all the time, never leaving me, following my every step, tailing me, mocking. Whether in the battlefield, during quiet work at the Belvedere, or in child's caresses - the ever-present shadow chased me, tormented me. A wretched, horrible dwarf on crooked legs, spitting out his filthy soul, spitting at me from all directions, not sparing anything that should be spared - family, relationships, my loved ones, following my every step, making ugly faces, reversing my every thought - the horrible dwarf crawled behind me, like an inseparable companion, dressed in flags of all types and colours - my country's, other countries', shouting slogans, his face contorting into ugly grimaces, inventing some incredible stories, that dwarf was my inseparable comrade, an ever-present companion in ups and downs, in fortune and misfortune, in victory and defeat. Don't think, gentlemen, that this is just a metaphor, I will quote but a handful of facts here, so horrible, so wild, that it's hard to think what kind of waste matter would have to infect one's imagination for one to be able to come up with such stories.
A representative of the people, elected by all, representing all - steals! A parliamentary committee convenes to locate the royal insignia stolen by that representative. A parliamentary committee, working under the aegis, or the leadership, of the speaker, probes, pries, investigates, searches for the objects allegedly stolen by the representative! Can you imaginer anything more horrible, more disgusting, more slimy? Can you have a representative like that? Imagine something like that elsewhere, among the free, independent nations: our representative - a thief! Our representative betrays the country in war, conspires with the enemy! The supreme commander, the commanding officer, is a traitor! Where is the punishment? Is there an attempt to oust him? Is there an attempt to bring him to justice, an attempt to make him accountable for these incredible crimes? There isn't! We are only talking about slander, about the slime the soul had to be filled with to bring itself to do such things. We are talking about some incredibly disgusting phenomenon of the human soul that is capable of such things. A horrendous dwarf, begotten from the domestic quagmire. Slapped in the face time and again by the foreign powers, sold from hand to hand, paid for. Here are those who want to lower to their level that which has been elevated. Gentlemen, let me repeat, I don't know, when I reflect on the past years, a phenomenon more constant, more methodically carried out, than this prying into the family relationships that everyone keeps at distance from, than this touching of my friends, my aides, virtually anyone who has become close to me, with dirty hands, a dirty soul, dirty words, and with dirty, stale air.
I know, my gentlemen, no phenomenon more constant when I trace my history in the past years!
I've had friends who got tired and left, I've had aides with whom I collaborated better or worse and who left me this or that way. But this foulness of the soul that was hurled at me was so inseparable, so systematic, that when I think of the past I always check whether my clothes may still be reeking. And that slur was christened with lofty words, with noble slogans. It was the so called national press, the so called patriotic press! This isn't tragic - for me. Such things have seldom happened in the world because they are ghastly, immoral, wild, and disgusting. They can only breed in the swamp of bondage that nations experience.'
I often returned to these words, full of bitterness and anger, when I read and heard how some of the best people in Poland are hurled abuse at, how villainy and servility are rewarded and excellence, moral courage, non-conformism - persecuted. And the example came from the top, from the highest-ranking government officials.
What did we hear from Jarosław Kaczyński? We heard that his 'opponents are very mean people, mediocre in every respect', we heard that the 'Third Republic's devious elites have stood here in close order for battle', we heard that the 'Polish state had until now been a huge scandal, a, let's say it, soft, postcolonial creation'. We heard that the Prime Minister's opponents are 'cheaters who insidiously twist the meaning of words'; that they are 'rude and present a peculiar anti-culture'; that they are 'sworn enemies of liberty'; that they 'suffer from an anti-government phobia'; that they 'mock our nation, mock its traditions, mock that which is actually the best in it'. Not bad for the head of government of a European democracy.
We, at Gazeta, heard in turn that we were a late mutation of the communist party, heard ourselves likened to the Trybuna Ludu, the communist party's official newspaper, of 1953, the height of Stalinist terror. Prime Minister Kaczyński knows this isn't true and yet he deliberately trickles this lie into his supporters' ears. He wants to win them over with lies because he obviously believes that honest arguments won't do the job. And that's the essence of the choice we are facing today. What Poland do we want to live in? A Poland of calumny, provocation, and contempt, the PiS's Poland, or in a Poland for everyone, a Poland where, to use the poet's words, right always means right, and justice means justice.
This is the question we will answer for ourselves in just two days.
