Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff

February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.

The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.

Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.

While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over the years, in fact an antagonism that dates back to the inter-war period. Michnik also refers to Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska: quick-witted, unsentimental and impatient with chauvinist clichés. When she died a year ago, on February 1, 2012, the nationalist MP and Law Professor Krystyna Pawlowicz said on Polish Radio: “I don’t associate Szymborska with Poland.”

A group of young writers protested against this xenophobic comment. Michnik wrote that Szymborska zdążyła przestrzec nas przed nienawiścią (managed to warn us against hate). And in Eastern Europe we badly need this warning, as the event last Saturday reminds us.

Outright hatred characterizes Poland’s ethno-nationalism, which combines with misogyny and homophobia. During a parliamentary debate over same-sex unions this month,  Pawlowicz continued her prejudiced discourse, labeling the LGBT community sterile people of no benefit to society and derided, lampooned and insulted the transgender MP Anna Grodzka. Nigerian-born and bred journalist Remi Adekoya wrote in The Guardian: “As a whole, modern-day “Poland is still a conservative, homogenous society, uncomfortable with minorities – be they sexual, ethnic or religious.”

In Poland, poets have played a political role since Romanticism or even the Baroque. Poetry is the cultivation of inner life and revolt; particularly in Eastern Europe, writing and reading has often encouraged social critique and — sometimes — change. (Banned authors!)

Poets here were silenced under totalitarianism and also under a far-right government in the recent past. Roman Giertych, who served as Minister of Education 2006-7, revived the All-Polish Youth with its interwar anti-Semitism and attempted to delete the eminent writer Witold Gombrowicz (a post-modernist avant la lettre) from school curricula because of his queerness. This was a nadir of democracy here, which Adam Michnik described as “The Polish Witch-Hunt.”

That’s why the poetry and political stances of the two Nobel Prize winners for literature, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, are of special significance. Both opposed conformity and chauvinism. As a student in intercultural Vilnius, Milosz intervened against an anti-Semitic rally of the All-Polish Youth militia. He translated Yiddish poetry (through a philological rendering of the text), and in his novel The Issa Valley he focused on his anti-feudal pacifist ancestors from the radical Reformation (Socinians). After World War II, Milosz and Szymborska welcomed the new system which promised equality. She became a party member. He served as a diplomat for the People’s Republic of Poland. Although Milosz soon defected, and Szymborska joined the opposition, they remained progressive until their last days. Just before Milosz’s death, they both signed a petition in defense of a feminist and gay pride in Cracow (Toleration March).

Milosz was a critic of capitalism. As a leader of the current leftist Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) movement, Slawomir Sierakowski, reminds us, Milosz was a critic of a society subordinated to the market. Right now  Krytyka Polityczna is publishing Milosz’s unknown and unfinished novel Gory Parnasu, a political fiction. His vision of a robotized and demoralized technocracy places this important new publication alongside the poet’s classic reckoning with communism in The Captive Mind.

After Milosz’s death in 2004, the All-Polish Youth was responsible for a hate campaign against the writer. They accused him of not being a “true Pole,” but rather a “friend of Jews and sodomites.” He was characterized as suspicious, dangerous, anti-Polish. In his poetry, Czeslaw Milosz explored the guilt that Poles have towards the Other. I am particularly moved and touched by his poem “Campo di Fiori,” in which Milosz depicts the indifference of Warsaw residents toward the death and suffering in the Jewish ghetto. The poet diagnosed the failure to admit Poland’s guilt; he wrote of his compatriots as “ill with their own innocence.” This verse from his poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” was quoted by the then All-Polish Youth leader, Krzysztof Bosak (currently part of the newly formed National Movement), in the official statement of this organization, as “deeply offensive to us.”

Szymborska’s death in February 2012 also evoked hostility: she was vilified as a cosmopolitan intellectual indifferent to Polishness. As mentioned, the MP and Professor of Law, Krystyna Pawlowicz, insulted Szymborska’s memory, and now she mocks same-sex unions and transgenderism. Academics, including the leading conservative historian of ideas Marcin Krol, the expert on anti-Semitism, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the feminists Magda Sroda and Malgorzata Fuszara, the queer scholar Jacek Kochanowski, and the LGBT art curator Pawel Leszkowicz, gathered together to protest against Pawlowicz’s homo- and transphobia.

Exactly twenty years ago abortion was criminalized in Poland; this 1993 law still crushes women’s rights. Ten years ago, a landmark lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen was vandalized. Pawel Leszkowicz and I participated in this campaign and describe it in our chapter for a Routledge book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant.

Under Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza has become a major force in the support of LGBT rights under the pen of eminent journalists such as Ewa Siedlecka, Dorota Jarecka and Piotr Pacewicz; the latter went as far as joining the Warsaw Gay Pride in drag! The Lublin branch of Gazeta regularly publishes reportages on homophobia and anti-Semitism by Pawel P. Reszka.

The  filmmaker, author of the Oscar-nominated movie about a Polish working-class saver of a group of Lviv Jews In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland, defined the current prejudiced behaviors in this country as “humiliating, excluding and scorning.” In a recent interview for the Polish edition of Newsweek, Holland, whose father was a Jewish intellectual, said: “It seems to me that the Jew has been exchanged for the homosexual.”

In 2004, the Szymborska and Milosz-supported Toleration March was assaulted with stones, bottles and caustic acid by far-right counter-demonstrators. As a protest against violence, young sociologists Adam Ostolski and Michal Bilewicz wrote an open letter signed, by 1200 people, which diagnosed lesbians and gays as being seen as “the pariahs of Polish democracy.” Later, Green politician, Ostolski, demonstrated parallels between Poland’s inter-war anti-Jewish policies and the current anti-LGBT prejudices. This insight was developed by analyst and activist Greg Czarnecki in his article “Analogies of Pre-War Anti-Semitism and Present-Day Homophobia in Poland” The ultranationalist attack on minorities and poetry continues.

I cherish Szymborska’s poem “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”: it stings us from complacency and its drastic imagery approaches the unspeakable. At this death camp the inmates ”sang, with dirt in their mouth… Write how quiet it is,” the poet adds. Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton rightly calls Szymborska’s work “Still” “one of the most shocking poems on the Holocaust.” It also warns against anti-Semitism after the war and states how prejudiced views of Jewish names continue: “Let your son have a Slavic name.”

The writings of the two poets were a protest against prejudice, social ills and violence. Szymborska depicted the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. Milosz dedicated a study to Poland’s rare leftist thinker Stanislaw Brzozowski and a book of memories to the conflicts and repressions of the interwar period here. He also authored a book on a poet of affectivity, linguistic genius, esprit and (early!) feminism, and a Warsaw Uprising fighter Anna Swir Swirszczynska.

Both poets accompanied us through the difficult post-1989 transition: Milosz warned against the triumphalism of the church, although he valued religion as a cultural phenomenon, translated the Bible as well as the mystic and workers’ activist and worker herself, Simone Weil.

Elzbieta Matynia of the New School invited Czeslaw Milosz to the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, where he often read not only his own poems, but also those of Szymborska. In 1999 I moderated a meeting with Milosz and international students of this Institute, during which his poetry reading healed rifts between Kosovar and Serbian participants in the audience.

And Szymborska, although less of a public figure, sent her pithy and disturbing poem “Hatred” to Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, when the country was faced with the threat of a rightist coup d’état: she wrote that hatred has a “grimace / of erotic ecstasy” and a “sniper’s keen sight” (to quote the translation of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak).

In their openness, Szymborska celebrated the male nude whereas Milosz cultivated the memory of Lublin’s gay poet Czechowicz, and wrote openly and approvingly of his homosexuality. Born in the puritan first decades of the twentieth century, they both proved to be progressive in sexual politics (middle-aged poets here are still in the Middle Ages!). In Poland, the visual arts equal activism:  in particular women’s and LGBT art create a splash. But Szymborska and Milosz, who drew on the avant-garde and produced popular poetry, contributed to the democratization of our post-Communist country. Their writings wake us from the slumber of national pride.

Resentment, conspiracy theories, the Great Lustrator, as Michnik puns on the Grand Inquisitor in his book In Search of Lost Meaning, rule Poland. In my view, prejudices have increased as the transition has lost its way, excluding so many people economically. The fight for minority rights must not overlook the plight of the underprivileged. That’s why we protested the layoff of 400 women workers in Lublin – and we succeeded. But all too often unemployment is wreaking havoc, as in Radom. Therefore, as Gazeta reports, in his lecture there Adam Michnik spoke about how the market economy has unleashed terrible social inequality.

In my view, it’s in the dispossessed of the transition that the far right finds its converts who are made to believe by the demoralized ultraconservative political class in an imaginary purity of the nation, from which all minorities are to be forbidden: Jews, Roma, LGBT and feminists are othered and rejected. We are not “one of our own” in Polish culture; according to the extremists, we do not belong here. After an anti-fascist interview I gave, a critical commenter declared: “Kitlinski, you’re a stranger.”

The poetry of Milosz and Szymborska has been important to the political philosophy and praxis of Adam Michnik. Expert on Eastern Europe Roger Cohen has written on Michnik in The New York Times:

“He was ever the provocateur, this Polish Jew whose paternal family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust. This Polish patriot. This crazy, proud Pole with the low-slung jeans that cry out for a belt, the hair conscientiously uncombed, the Polish-Latin lover’s stubble and the mind that is anything but sloppy. As he provoked, he probed: the totalitarian mind was always a target for him, even in its fathomless grayness.”

Now Adam Michnik probes the old-new prejudices  of our region of Europe. Ever with courage and wit, he challenges ethno-nationalism. His is a badly needed idea of liberty. With a full awareness of his roots in poetry, imagination and decency, I deplore the violence against his lecture in Radom.

In my last post, concerning the inadequacies of the debate around the Jedwabne atrocities, I highlighted the distance between the informed debate and the broad understanding of the population at large, especially people far from the major cities, uninvolved in and not comprehending elite cultural debates. I pointed out that the popular distrust of official rhetoric which made a great deal of sense during the Communist period was now being applied to the important discussion about the painful past, making the debate for much of the population counterproductive. The consequences of this are becoming tragically evident now in a cultural war, spreading like wild fire across Poland, a cultural war about educational reform.

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Educational reform in Poland has been ongoing since 1999 – each of its stages stirring controversies of a different sort.  The most recent protests could be labeled as the “Occupy” stage.  The protests have been coalescing around some supposedly minor changes in school curriculum that aim to integrate middle school and high school programs and also allow students to choose, for the first time, a subject track in high school.

The core reason for these protests is a new way of offering and teaching history, in particular the introduction of the new “History and Society” course for students in the science track. This course will encompass overarching topics that the teacher will be able to develop together with students. Among the list of recommended topics provided by the Ministry of Education are the following: “Europe And The World,” “War and Military Systems,”  “Woman, Man, Family,” and “Motherland’s Pantheon And Motherland’s Disputes.”

Proponents of the reform believe that it succeeds in finding solutions to two major problems: first, the new curriculum provides much better continuity between middle and high school, allowing students to cover a greater swath of history. Middle school students and first year high school students will follow a unified World and Polish history curriculum, after which they get to choose their track.   Second, science track students will be able to build upon the history knowledge they acquired in earlier grades, but now they will learn to use critical thinking skills (as opposed to rote memorization) to deepen their understanding of history.

The opponents interpret the reform quite differently. The new reform is for them de facto the way to get rid of history lessons altogether from Polish high schools – students under the new reform will not be exposed to enough history, and there is a risk that students will not study Polish history at all.  Their beliefs are based on their analysis that 95% of students will choose the science track, thus receiving only about one hour a week of history. Moreover, that one-hour offering is a “diluted” history course – “History and Society.”  In addition, the opponents fear that there is no control over teacher choice of topics within  “History and Society” – teachers will be able to choose topics that do not emphasize Polish history.  Thus, the opponents believe, the new reforms will discourage the formation of students’ Polish identity.

Public protests against education reform began with hunger strikes initiated by groups of parents in eight Polish cities in February and March 2012. These protests were embraced (or fueled) by the right-wing “Law and Justice” and “United Poland” parties. The parties prepared an alternative education law assuring the focused study of history by all students, regardless of their chosen track. In their own words, the law would “bring history lessons back” to high schools. Most importantly, the parties are using a legislative procedure known as a “civic draft,” which requires the signatures of 100,000 citizens.

The hunger strikes have now evolved into the “Let’s Bring History Lessons Back To Schools” project, taking place in more than 100 cities where local coordinators are collecting signatures.

A group of hunger strikers, supported by academics and teachers, established an additional entity, “The Civic Commission for National Education.” The role of this group is vague. On their website, they emphasize the need for a more thorough reform of the entire educational system and declare that “they want to be everywhere where they are needed to be,” and that they feel “obliged and competent” to review school textbooks. They also encourage regional Civic Commissions to self-organize.

Both of the above-described initiatives demonstrate the urge to bring history back – not only by actions but also through symbols. The very name, the “Civic Commission for National Education” is a peculiar mix of “Civic Committees of Solidarity,” organized before the first free elections of June 4^th 1989, and “The Commission for National Education, ” established in 18^th century Poland to reform schools. The Commission’s website incorporates historical imagery: the use of the “Solidarity” font; bread – recalling a symbol of religion and folk traditions; and white-red elements, which recall the Polish flag.

The website of the project “Let’s Bring History Lessons Back to Schools” evokes similar reactions through its use of language. The website’s pamphlet reads:

We are bringing history lessons back to schools! Starting September 1, 2012, based on the Ministerial ordinance, history lessons will be eliminated from the Polish schools. Do not agree with this! You are a Pole! Sign the protest. Help to collect 100,000 signatures. It is your obligation to future generations!

A quotation by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, one of the most charismatic figures of the anti-Communist opposition, accompanies the pamphlet:

A nation without history, without the past, becomes a nation without land, homeless, and without a future.  A nation, which does not believe in greatness and does not desire great individuals – ends.

* * *

It is hard to understand how such a gross misunderstanding of educational reform took hold.  At least 20,000 signatures collected so far testify to the misguided belief that there is a need to bring back something that was never actually discarded. Furthermore, the actions of a right-wing party clearly using political manipulation earned the eventual embrace of a grassroots movement.

Hard to understand – unless, of course, one understands that the right-wing politicians were addressing the “silent majority,” – the “outside-the-center” part of Polish society, excluded from many public debates after 1989 and unable to adjust to the mainstream political discourse. The call to fight injustice matched all the needs and expectations of this group, making them the warriors of a culture war.

The heroic goal to defend the Motherland (through preserving history classes), and the even more important use of patriotic-religious vocabulary and imagery, serve successfully to excite the post-Romantic political imagination of many Poles. The Romantic notion included the belief in the unique mission of Polish suffering in the redemption of Europe, and in the unique role of the past to affect the identity formation of new generations. The anti-education reform movement buys into these romantic notions – reminding Poles of who they are and proving the importance of taking action.

This imagination continued throughout the Communist era and never found closure; the revolution of 1989 swept it under.  The rush to modernize, to catch up with other democracies in Europe, and to adopt a pragmatic tone, marginalized a large population of Poles – not only economically, but also linguistically and culturally.

The need to discuss the past, unsatisfied so many times in public debates since 1989, became the fuel for resistance against mainstream politics. It exploded now due to the belief that educational reform would “annihilate” the past through its discarding of history classes. This is the symbolic dimension of the protests: for the protestors, defending history means defending their own existence in the political landscape of Poland.

In order to regain their position in the political discourse, the protestors believe that they must start anew – recreate a “second-chance 1989” in which their voices, their sensitivities, will be the leading vision in society. This explains the building of alternative institutions, furnished with bold symbols referring to the past.

The protests cannot be easily dismissed: they have grown into independent bottom-up organizations, locally grown, with a national network, and they address the concerns of a diverse and numerous crowd: parents, teachers, the “local intelligentia groups,” – all concerned about change. Of the curriculum and much more.

Thus, the cynical action of politicians has turned into a fast-growing grassroots initiative, with the potential to grow beyond the original focus on education reform.

If it does – it may become a sort of “Occupy Values” movement; but if it doesn’t, the frustration of the ones involved will not evaporate, fortified as it now is by the experience of common active engagement.

PS.  A few weeks ago, the ministry confirmed that the topic from its recommended list that is exclusively devoted to Polish history, “Motherland’s Pantheon, Motherland’s Disputes,” will be compulsory within the “History and Society” class. The protestors welcomed the news as proof that “pressure brings results.”  At this point, it is not clear whether this will inspire the protestors to escalate their demands, or to declare victory and retreat from politics.