Hiya Rooboy,
I was in a rush when I wrote this piece, and couldn't find the two texts I am
quoting below. Hence this new version.
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 Polish prose writers, Bruno
Schulz? All those I mentioned here have contributed to a definition of
“polishness”, in the changing times they gave us glimpses of what we are as
Poles. Some politicians and some good artists do that willy-nilly. 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’s, of German stock, nothing unusual in that, she refused to
sign the Deutsche Volksliste when Poland was occupied by Hitler, and declared
herself Polish. Later 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strife and wars are things of the past, where resistance has been
replaced by friendship and reconciliation, we are losing our understanding of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.) The
concept of nationality when so severely limited, as you propose, to blood and
geography alone, loses its wider sense to do with language, culture and ethical
values. It loses its grounding in what really makes human cohesion into large
groups meaningful and purposeful. After all, many different nations profess to
share the same values and aspirations - and the trick is to say the same things,
and to put into life the same things, using different grammars, behaviours and
traditions - and any attempt at using pre-political, tribal, criteria, as basis
for a common bond, makes it impossible to apply values shared and respected by
all. I am saying this about the new unified Europe. That is the only place I
know a little.
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’s, 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. And, of course, one
must remember that by 1987 the first Great Solidarity (Wielka
Solidarność) also belonged to the past. There was a very frustrating
cognitive hiatus when talking about future plans, relating them to the past, in
the shadow of totalitarian regime’s ever present security apparatus. That first
text appeared in 1987 in the Roman Catholic monthly “Znak”. Its motto is,
“Journal for those who are not afraid to think”. That first text tells me
that Mr Tusk, and many others who thought along similar lines, lets not
concentrate exclusively on Mr Tusk, are passionate about Poland. They were then,
and are now. Those two texts compliment each other.
Let me give you two other examples of texts, which might be deemed
“unpatriotic”. The first is by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, the other by
the founder of Czechoslovakia Tomas Masaryk. They were not any less Russian or
Czech for saying those things. Here is Lermontov’s farewell to Russia, on his
exile by the tsarist authorities in 1841. Can you spot any similarities?
Прощай, немытая Россия,
Страна рабов, страна господ,
И вы, мундиры голубые,
И ты, им преданный народ.
Быть может, за стеной Кавказа
Сокроюсь от твоих пашей,
От их всевидящего глаза,
От их всеслышащих ушей.
And here is Masaryk on patriotism:
„Já nemám rád prázdné mluvení o slovanství, jako nemám rád vlastenčení. (…) A
nač to mluvení: normální člověk nevytrubuje do světa, že miluje své rodiče, svou
ženu, své děti; to se rozumí samo sebou. Když miluješ svou vlast, nemusíš o tom
mluvit, ale udělej něco kloudného; o nic jiného nejde. (…) Člověk už je takový,
že rád poslouchá svého srdce; právě proto o lásce nemluví, ale hledá pomoci
rozumem. (…) Nevyvolávám-li o sobě, že jsem vlastenec, nekřičím o tom druhém, že
je zrádce vlasti; musím trpělivě dokazovat, že jeho cesta je z těch a těch
důvodů chybná. Takovými velkými hesly se mohou lidé opíjet, ale nemohou se jimi
naučit pracovat. Osvobodili jsme se od despotických pánů; teď ještě se musíme
osvobodit od velkých a despotických slov. Pravda, lidé se drží slov nejen v
politice, nýbrž ve všech oborech, v náboženství, vědě, filosofii. Proto jsem
vždy kladl důraz na věci, na pozorování a poznání faktů; ale dobře pozorovat a
poznávat – k tomu je třeba lásky.“
You project something of your own, I reckon, when you question Mr Tusk's motives
to have a church marriage. But that is your problem. I'm not in favour of people
putting their hoofs into anybody's private life.
pzdr ciepło
t1
