By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 10th, 2011 
I am on the road from Gdansk. It’s been an intense few days. Last Tuesday, I joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration for a bit. By Wednesday, I was in the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity confronted the Party State in 1980, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I was interviewed for the Solidarity Video Archive, giving my account of the work I did with Solidarity and my understanding of the great labor movement. Immediately after which, I was taken to Gdansk University, where I gave my talk, this year’s Solidarity Lecture, “Reinventing Democratic Culture.” It opened the All About Freedom Festival. Over the weekend, I visited my family in Paris, and now I am flying over the Atlantic on my delayed flight to Newark, hoping I will get back to New York in time to teach my 4:00 class, The Politics of Everyday Life. It has been a packed week.
Unpacking my thoughts is a challenge. A new social movement is developing in the U.S., with potentially great impact. In Poland, a new generation is confronting the Solidarity legacy, trying to appreciate the accomplishments, while also needing to address new problems. Yesterday’s elections in France and especially in Poland were important. Yet, just as important for what was not on the ballot as for what was. Everywhere, there seems to be a political – society agitation and disconnect, with the politics of small things potentially contributing to a necessary reinvention of democratic culture.
I have many thoughts and will need more time to put them into a clear perspective. Here, just a start. I have a sense that things are connected: not falling apart, rather, coming together.
In the U.S., the central ideal of equality has been compromised in the last thirty years. From being a country with more equal distribution . . .
Read more: Things Come Together: Occupy Wall Street, Solidarity, Elections and Khodorkovsky
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 8th, 2011 
Next week I am off to the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Institute opens today, but I will be arriving a few days late. As I review the events of this week at Deliberately Considered, I am anticipating my work at the Institute, which will be reflected in upcoming posts. The last two posts, on Iran and on American identity, in fact, were informed by Democracy and Diversity experience.
In the most mundane way, the Institute is like many other international summer schools. Students from many different countries, this year Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Italy, Poland, and the USA, among others, come together to study a set of problems from a number of different academic perspectives. As usual, in my judgment, the topics are particularly interesting, this year, each addressing the theme of the year The World in Crisis: “Gender in Crisis? Strengths and Weaknesses in the Strategy of Emergency” (Prof. Ann Snitow), “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb and Prof. Daniel Dayan), “Romancing Violence: Theories and Practices of Political Violence” (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia), and “‘We the People’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Belonging” (Prof. Sharika Thiranagama). Still there are many summer schools that offer interesting programs with talented students such as we have. Yet, there is something special about this Institute that makes it different than most summer programs, linked to its history.
In terms of my student’s observations and reflection on Iran this week, our institute is in a sense, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, a not so lost treasure of  the revolutionary tradition. He observed how freedom was experienced in the days before and after the 2009 elections in his country, and noted how even in the face of extreme repression, the ability of independent people to speak and act in each other’s presence is still consequential, apparently preventing the execution of Habibollah Latifi. But the real significance of the free politics, before the elections of 2009 and through the Facebook . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Democracy and Diversity and Free Public Action
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 17th, 2010 
 Democracy, social justice, freedom, cultural refinement and pleasure, all, along with their opposites, are to be found in the detailed meetings and avoidances, engagements and disengagements, comings and goings of everyday life. The politics of small things has been our theme of the week.
Adam Michnik and I decided to try to organize our friends in a common discussion. Despite the workings of the security police and his jailers, and despite the hard realities of the cold war, we created alternatives in our own lives, and this affected many others. Although I am not informed about the specifics, I am sure that such things are now happening in China.
But I should be clear. I am not saying that therefore, the People’s Republic’s days are numbered, or that liberal democracy is just around the corner. Escalation in repression is quite a likely prospect. Michnik’s life after receiving our honorary doctorate did at first lead to a prison cell. Shirin Ebadi is in exile today, as was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after his prize. But people continue to interact around the shared human rights principles to which these people dedicated their lives, and this has persistent effects, at least for those people, but beyond their social circles as well. As Michnik put it “the value of our struggle lies not in its chances for victory but rather in the values of its cause.” My point is that if people keep acting according to those values, they are very much alive and consequential.
And it is in this way that I applaud the Afghan Womens Soccer team and  understand its significance. That these young women manage to play their game despite all the horrors of war and occupation, despite the persistence of harmful traditional practices and inadequate implementation of the law on elimination of violence against women in Afghanistan (this was the subject matter of the UN report that Denis Fitzgerald referred to in his reply to my post) is their great achievement. We have to pay attention to such achievements, and . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: the significance of the politics of small things
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 14th, 2010
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo on this year’s  International Human Rights Day, December 10,2010, reminded me of a Human Rights Day past, on December 10 1984, when the Polish dissident, Adam Michnik, received his honorary doctorate from the New School for Social Research in a clandestine ceremony in a private apartment in Warsaw. Such ceremonies not only honor achievements of the past, they also have possible practical promising consequences. Something I observed as an eyewitness then; something that may be in China’s future now.
As China revealed its repressive nature in its response to the prize, the dignity and critical insight of the dissident was revealed in Liu’s own words, as Liv Ullmann read his “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court.”
The same pattern occurred in awarding Michnik’s doctorate, though in his case it was a two part story.
Part One: Michnik was scheduled to receive his degree in a university ceremony in New York on April 25, 1984, commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the University in Exile (what would become the New School’s social science graduate school in which I am a professor) by honoring human rights activists from around the world. Because Michnik was imprisoned as part of a martial law crackdown on independent thinkers and political and labor activists, Czeslaw Milosz accepted the honorary degree on his behalf and read from his “Letter for General Kiszczak”, in which Michnik declined an offer of exile as the condition for release from prison.
The Polish Nobel Laureate for Literature read the democratic activist’s passionate denunciation of his interior minister jailer and Michnik’s justification of his commitment to human rights: “the value of our struggle lies not in its chances for victory but rather in the values of its cause.” He explained in the letter how his refusal of a comfortable exile was an affirmation of these values, keeping them alive in Poland.
Part Two of the story actually occurred on International Human Rights Day of 1984. It suggested and led to much more.
I was in Warsaw for the unofficial ceremony presenting Adam Michnik . . .
Read more: Human Rights Day
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 11th, 2010 
Elzbieta Matynia is an expert on democratic movements, and here, reflects on the recent Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiabo and the chance for Chinese democracy. -Jeff
The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.
One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?
There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.
When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard. The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.
Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a . . .
Read more: From Liu Xiabo: A Seed of Strength for Chinese Political Protesters
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