Jarosław Kaczyński: To sprawa pana Tuska

I still have a problem with your narrow definition of who can be Polish. I just
don't understand it. If Mr Tusk is not Polish, and if Mr Jarosław Kaczyński is
not Polish, then Mr Lech Kaczyński, the Polish president is not Polish, and
neither are millions of other inhabitants of the beautiful Polish land.
Piłsudski is out on his moustache as some kind of a freak without roots, Matejko
a Czech upstart with a paint brush, Chopin is a French composer obsessed with
funny melodies from a far country. And what about Mickiewicz? Just a nutter, who
decided to write in the Polish language? And where would you place the author of
"Kwiaty polskie", Tuwim, or one of the best ever prose writers, Bruno Schulz?
One could go on for a long time. I am reminded of the mother of one of my
friends. Born in Poland in the 1920-ies, of German stock, nothing unusual in
that, she refused to sign the Deutsche Volksliste when Poland was occupied by
Hitler, and declared herself Polish. She worked for the resistance, and nearly
paid with her life for that defiance. Is she not Polish? Today in a unified
Europe, where strife and wars are things of the past, where resistance has been
replaced by friendship and reconciliation, we are losing our understanding of
the nature of choices people had to make in the shadow of guns, watchtowers,
flags, and other symbols of oppression and political slavery. A good thing
perhaps. But all that also belongs to the wider context of Mr Tusk's utterance
on being Polish, about which below. (Read Norman Davies and Janusz Tazbir.)

Many thanks for your quotations of Mr Tusk. The first one shows a man with great
insight, who having absorbed all the official stuff about Polish greatness and
Poland’s special role in the world, presents us with a personal reaction to it
all, talking about a drab country drained of aspirations and ambition, lacking
the will to go on and fight for a better future, a country on its knees with no
strength left, a pale shadow of its former glory of centuries ago, ravaged and
terribly demoralised by two world wars and 40 years of Communism. But such was
Poland in the 1980-ies, and that former glorious past was like a bad dream in
the national psyche, with no relevance to the present, a dream about an illusion
which lured the mind towards nothing real and productive. Poland then was a
country reduced from past greatness to greyness and poverty. That first text
tells me that Mr Tusk, and many others who thought along similar lines, lets no
concentrate exclusively on Mr Tusk, are passionate about Poland. They were then,
and are now. Those two texts compliment each other.

You project something of your own, I reckon, when you question Mr Tusk's motives
to have a church wedding. But that is your problem. I'm not in favour of people
putting their hoofs into anybody's private life.

pzdr,

t1