In response to threats made by right-wing “patriot” hooligans to interrupt the grand ceremony, Zygmunt Bauman has recently rejected the honoris causa degree he was to be awarded by the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw. He said he did not want to cause any more trouble after his lecture had been interrupted in June by a crowd of young aggressive men, shouting out nationalist and xenophobic slogans. They are becoming a disturbingly familiar sight in large Polish cities. In their eyes, Bauman is not a famous scholar, but a Jewish Communist collaborator, a disgrace to the Polish nation. He is probably the biggest Polish name in the social sciences since Florian Znaniecki, and far more popular than are the hooligans. His books can be found in most trendy bookstores around the world. The university decided to grant him the degree against the “patriotic storm,” but given the swirling controversy, to cancel the customary lecture. The decision was cheered by some commentators, while others accused the institution of exploiting the scholar’s name for its own benefit.

Indeed, Bauman’s past as an officer of the Polish Communist army in the Stalinist period, a time remembered for painful repressions and murders of anti-Communist war heroes, raises questions. In fact, one of the major Polish universities initially wanted to grant Bauman an honorary degree in the mid-2000s, only to ax it when a number of scholars voiced their disapproval. The simple explanation is envy, but Bauman’s past is deeply troubling. His interview, conducted still in 2010, but published in the main Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza a week after the interrupted lecture, explained his involvement in Communist structures as a young man’s infatuation with ideology, but given his close ties to the apparatus of violence, the answers felt to many to be too easy.

The question is, how do you judge outstanding scholars (or artists, or politicians, etc.) who have complicated pasts? According to popular Polish imagination, the nation’s famous figures should be flawless. They are to be “monuments more durable than bronze,” as Horace once described poets. The effect of such impossible standards is twofold: on the one hand, the person’s supporters hide information that could tarnish the perfect image. On the other, the opponents do everything to demonize the person. What is lost is the actual human being. A vivid example of how destructive this approach can be both for the idolized figure, and for people who conceal his less-than-perfect deeds, is the scandal that broke out in the Gazeta Wyborcza after a posthumous biography of Ryszard Kapuściński by a journalist from the daily revealed that some of Kapuściński’s documentaries were, in fact, fiction. The messenger was accused of slandering a dead hero.

Another question is how are people to remember a person brilliant in one particular field, but questionable in others? Given the popular Polish black-and-white approach, this is an intolerable conflict that has to be either ignored or erased, by turning the person either into a saint or a demon. Particularly the latter has been visible in the recent years, largely thanks the Institute of National Remembrance, founded in 1999. It is most famous for housing Communist archives and conducting biased investigations on Communist-era “secret collaborators,” which turned into witch-hunts against political dissidents, such as the symbol of “Solidarity,” Lech Wałęsa, critical of the right-wing PiS (Law and Justice) party. The institute’s investigations set the tone of public debate: “us” vs. “them,” and the atmosphere has not changed much in over a decade.

Bauman’s position in popular Polish imagination was unfavorable from the beginning: he was a Communist and he is Jewish, which are the two worst insults one can hear in Poland. What’s more, the fact that he is a world-famous scholar appears to be more trouble than reason to be proud, because only some believe he should be honored as an academic. It is far easier to claim that he should be condemned as a person. In the popular debate, the two aspects are impossible to separate, and refraining from judgment is beyond thinkable. Thus, while the dominant belief is that the Polish Hall of Fame should be filled with saint-like figures, instead it is a proverbial “Polish hell” of accusations thrown against the potential candidates.

If one looks at this particular conflict over moral purity from a pragmatic point of view, it is Poland, not Bauman, which loses on the international scale. But in the Polish imagination the nation’s assets are not based on sound judgment, but on superficial moralism. This delusional hypocrisy fosters extremisms based on groundless beliefs, making actual discussion increasingly difficult. In this sense, the case of Bauman is another vivid illustration of the growing impossibility of shaping nuanced opinions in key debates in Poland, a society divided into simplistic “us” and “them,” dissidents and Communists, patriots and traitors. And this is to be found not only at the extreme margin, but more tragically at the very center of public life, as the dishonoring of Zygmunt Bauman reveals.

Prior to Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture, the event commemorating the 150^th anniversary of German Social Democracy, described in part 1, members of the National Rebirth of Poland had summoned each other via Facebook in order to stage its disruption and formulated negative judgments concerning Zygmunt Bauman’s past. Informed about the imminent danger, Leszek Miller, former prime minister and the chairman of the Polish Social Democratic Party, sent a letter to the Minister of Interior Affairs, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, requesting the protection of the event. The German ambassador to Poland, in an analogous move intervened at the Foreign Ministry. Consequentially, the event was secured by the police, and Bauman and his companion were assigned personal bodyguards at the University’s expense.

Shortly before the meeting, the police officer in charge of the action at the University of Wrocław said that he was obliged to stay within the limits of law and that accordingly, he could not intervene unless there was an immediate danger to life, health and property. To the argument that people who came to the lecture with an evident and announced intention to disrupt it are about to violate academic customs and rules of scholarly debate, he responded that the law does not protect these values. One of the main sources of the audacity of the Polish xenophobic groupings is the helplessness of law and of its execution. Polish law protects all sorts of irrational beliefs and religious feelings, which incidentally are in Poland extremely easily hurt, but it does not protect the principles of free scholarly discourse.

Radicalism at the Academia

After the disruption of Bauman’s lecture, some commentators said that xenophobic graduates of the academies of hatred have now decided to enter the universities. Disruptions of the lectures of the philosophy professor Magdalena Środa and editor Adam Michnik have been invoked in support of such opinions. Attempting to restore some symmetry into the debate, Ryszard Legutko, a professor of philosophy and a current member of the European Parliament, has recalled an event at the University of Warsaw in which he took part together with Norman Podhoretz. It was disrupted by a leftist group, and the police intervened there as well. One may also add that several years back the philosopher Peter Singer from Princeton University was prevented by Catholic activists from speaking at an ethical congress in Warsaw, because of his stance on euthanasia. Desiderio Navarro, a Cuban intellectual, publisher and translator of Polish literature into Spanish, recently fell a victim of a racist attack in Kraków; no such thing happened to him during his frequent visits to Poland over the past 35 years.

The opinion that nationalist xenophobia is only beginning to enter the universities is misleading. If any ideology is nowadays prominent at the otherwise de-politicised academies, it is the xenophobic. In fact, it has been present at Polish universities for a very long time now, and seems to be quite at home there.

Shortly after the disruption Bauman’s lecture, a professor of the University of Wrocław, a representative of the xenophobic, spoke, symbolically, under the monument of the king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry, Bolesław The Great, 967-1025, the first crowned king of Poland, who waged successful wars against Germany and Russia. The professor described the organizers of Bauman’s lecture as neo-Stalinists [which would include Chmielewski, J.G.] and accordingly called for the de-Stalinisation of the University. Two weeks after the disturbance, this call, eagerly seized on by the NOP, became a pretext and a slogan of a yet another of its demonstration in the public space of Wrocław. The NOP, now charged with a great momentum after its repeated “successes,” and staged it, once again, with impunity.

The call to de-Stalinise the University of Wrocław, formulated by this particular professor, was ironic. First, because he is a convert, having been a member of the Polish communist party who changed his denomination into “nationalist” and is now apparently seeking a place on an electoral list of PiS (the Law and Justice Party, and second, because there are no Stalinists at the university anymore. Most have died out, while those who somehow managed to survive, like this particular professor, changed their views radically because some time ago Stalinism ceased to be profitable. They have adopted the xenophobic outlook as nowadays it has become profitable.

Professors, like priests, are only human. No wonder, then, that some of them are doing and thinking what is expedient. Some members of the Polish professoriate, frustrated by humiliating salaries, are seeking substitute satisfactions in the sphere of historical politics, expertly served to them by PiS. Being unable to enjoy recognition for their work, they are finding a vicarious yet unfailing satisfaction in the public denunciation games against their academic comrades who happen to hold different political views.

Academic Image

Immediately after the incident the Rector of the University of Wrocław was asked the question whether he intends to take any action defending academic integrity of the institution, leading to: (i) bringing to justice the perpetrators of the disruption which violated scholarly discourse and academic customs; (ii) investigation of the behavior of academics of the University who formulated abusive opinions about the invited guest and the organizers of the lecture; (iii) protection of freedom of scholarly investigations and openness of academic discourse through the prevention of similar disruptions taking place in the future; (iv) salvaging the image of the University of Wrocław as a place of scientific work, open toward differing views; and (v) the protection of academic workers undertaking to organize extra-curricular scholarly events. Such steps would seem to be necessary for very practical as well as principled reasons. For, one may now expect that as a result of such incidents, scholars and public figures, as well as student of diverse backgrounds, may in the future decline invitations to take part in events organised by the University of Wrocław, or to enroll in it.

The Rector’s response has been a demonstration of helplessness. He has no legal means at his disposal to do any of these things. Shortly after this exchange, an assembly of rectors of the higher education institutions in Wrocław adopted a resolution against xenophobia, which was both an expression of their determination and of their powerlessness.

On the day of the incident at the University of Wrocław, the Minister of Higher Education, Barbara Kudrycka, called the organizers asking for a private address of Bauman in order to send him a letter of apology. Sending such a letter is certainly a proper thing to do. The question remains whether Minister Kudrycka, before she leaves her office, will take any other action regarding the problem at hand. And if so, what kind of action? Will she bother herself to respond to the same questions, which have been addressed to the Rector of the University of Wrocław?

The present and the future minister of higher education will have to respond to a more general question as well. Suppose anyone within the academia attempts to invite an eminent scholar who, apart from being a recognized professional, happens also to be a Jew, Arab, German, Russian, feminist, gay, lesbian, Muslim, Protestant, Pentecostal, atheist, of a different colour, a social democrat, or a cosmopolitan. Will such a person have to take into account a possible threat from local xenophobes who may happen to perceive the invited guest as persona non grata? Will it be necessary from now on to ask for the police protection of any academic event, of which local racists happen to disapprove? Will the Minister of the Interior place his troops at the rectors’ disposal? Given the present circumstances, will the Ministry be ready to pick up the tab of the increased security costs of deliberations in the humanities and social sciences?

The politics of the present regime towards higher education, which has generated an attitude of extreme asceticism while imposing a demand of innovation, in this context a rather absurd one, suggesting that it will not be willing to cover the increased costs of scholarly research and higher education. This means that the space of free academic discourse, much reduced already by inadequate funding of research and academies, will rapidly shrink even further.

On the other hand, one is justified in suspecting that the present regime will be more willing to cover the cost of police protection of the universities rather than that of their adequate funding. Yet if the regime decides to protect the academies by police, itself heavily under-subsidized, it will have to acquiesce to the fact that scientific deliberations conducted in the shadow of police sticks and their smoothbore rifles may not be able to bring forth particularly bold or innovative results. Democracy and academic freedom are challenged, not only from the ultra-nationalists, but also from the politicians who tolerate and encourage them, and the educational officials with no apparent means for effective response.

German Responsibility

During deafening nationalist protests against Bauman, some demonstrators raised their hands in the Nazi salute. For the Germans present this unashamed public emulation of the Nazi symbolism by the Polish extremists was a shock; the Consul General sat in the first row of the audience with his face ashen from fear.

The spirit of Nazism has not been irrevocably buried in Germany. Symbols of the political culture concocted by Hitler’s spin-doctors turn out to be more lively than anyone expected. With their own neo-Nazism reborn, Germans must now feel as if the package, sent by their grandparents, has been again delivered with several decades delay. Most of them dump this package into the trash bin; some of them bury it, ashamed, in a cellar; some store its contents with nostalgia. But some of them, among them the youngest, open the package with curiosity and set free the noxious elements contained in it. But this Nazi package, against the intention of its sender, is now being received also by descendants of a nation which particularly suffered from Nazis cruelties. In this way the Polish-German reconciliation, usually perceived through the gestures of political correctness, turns out to possess an another surprising dimension, an “incorrect” one, and, as a rule, hidden from the public view.

Bauman is a sharp critic of the present economic and social order. He believes that the present social and economic regime in Poland and in the world is deeply unjust, leads to exclusions, and grows within itself seeds of its own demise. In the lecture, he said that political parties which now pretend to represent the ideals of the Left, like the German SPD and the Polish SLD, should be held accountable for the emergence of this order, for they have betrayed the leftist values and became instead societies of mutual admiration with business bosses. He meant especially what Gerhard Schröder, known as Genosse der Bosse [Comrade of the Bosses], had done to the SPD, of which he was a leader. Bauman expressed this judgement in the same University room in which, precisely ten years earlier, Chancellor Schröder represented Germany during a meeting of the so-called Weimar Triangle, a consultation forum for political leaders of France, Germany and Poland.

The Poles are entitled to expect that Germans, especially from the present SPD, should take a clear stance concerning what is going on in their own country. They should also be aware that the Polish brand of Nazism is today not only an internal problem of Poland; it is also a problem of Germany, as well as of Europe as a whole, a sad outcome of the neo-liberal European political-economic order with Germany at its helm.

Party of Order and the status quo

When I insisted that the authorities of the University of Wrocław summon the police in order to protect an academic event, and then insisted that the commander of the police troops remove the troublemakers, I suddenly remembered Arthur Schopenhauer who pointed out to the police the most convenient place for them to shoot at the revolutionary masses during the Spring of Peoples in 1848. I also remembered Karl Marx’s ironic remarks from his 18th Brumaire: yes, I acted as a representative of the Party of Order who called the police to protect the status quo.

The point is, however, that I am not really convinced that the present political and economic order in Poland deserves to be protected. Bauman ingeniously and critically diagnoses the system whose products and symptoms are precisely those people who came to vilify him. And he seeks for ways to reform it. That is why he was invited to speak.

It may appear that extremist groupings in Poland also demand a change of the social order, as Bauman does; and that the difference between them lies only in the methods advocated. But this is not so. The present Polish radicalism is nationalistic, patriotic, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-communist, anti-Semitic, anti-German, anti-European, anti-intellectual, etc. In a word, it stands for everything that is officially suppressed by the liberal and tolerant elites, striving to impose upon society their own version of constraints of decency. In this sense the Polish radicalism, in its exhibitionism and pornographic obscenity, may be perceived as a symptom of social revolt.

The question of a more just distribution of wealth is not addressed by its members. In this sense, Polish radicalism is thoroughly conservative. It does not strive towards a change of the political system, because it draws from it all its strength, and moves within it unperturbed. The whole raison d’être of the Polish radical movements is to excite disorders during which their members can demonstrate their own strength, and subsequently to use it as a bargaining argument, and a political commodity. This is the whole point of politics understood as a spectacle within which to be is to be perceived. The present system is needed by them as a venue or a scene upon which to perform their rituals of brutality and hatred. They will not find any better one. For this reason precisely they need the cosmopolitans, Jews, Arabs, Blacks, agents, communist, Stalinists, Germans, Russians, Europeans and egg-heads in order to stage their rituals of hate. They are employing their inconsistent ideological conglomerate because it guarantees to them an inexhaustible supply of objects for their hatred. Should the objects, per impossible, become in short supply, they would create them without much effort. For the time being their strength is basically the strength of a spectacle; for this reason it is only an appearance of strength. They will become really dangerous when they understand this. And they are just one step from it. One has only to wait to see whether they will summon the courage to make this step.

It has become nowadays a commonplace of political criticism that the contemporary political system has been transformed into a pathetic caricature of democracy. The slogan of democratic participation is only a smokescreen for the growing oligarchisation of societies and despotisation of politics at all its levels. In sphere of the economy, the Civic Platform excels in cultivating this art and elevated it to new levels of sophistication through managing the assets of the country in order to create further inequalities and without bothering about their social costs. The situation of a deep imbalance of social structure thus created cannot be remedied overnight; it has gone way too far. For this reason, the Finance Minister Vincent Rostowski will now have to find a place for a new rubric on the expenditure side of his budget: “the costs of social peace.” The longer he delays this, the more hefty sums he will have to put in this rubric in the future. Such a rubric will have to be filled also by the Minister of Finance in any Law and Justice government.

Cracked Crust

The six post-war decades in Poland have brought disenchantment with the leftist utopia. The past two decades of the transformation have brought disenchantment with conservative liberalism. Radicalism in Poland destroys politics and dispels the hope for social peace. It overwhelms the churches and universities, the last enclaves of relative decency. What, then, has the future in store for us? Bertrand Russell compared civilized life to a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava, which at any moment may break and let the unwary sink into its fiery depths. John Gray has argued that the best that flawed and potentially wicked human creatures can hope for is a commitment to civilized constraints that will prevent the very worst from happening: a politics of the least worst.

The problem is that in Poland the crust of constraints of decency turned out to be very thin, and has cracked again. The lava flowing from below refuses to cool down by itself. Nor will it cool off any time soon, or easily.

To skip this introduction and go directly to read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 1,” click here.

I tried to highlight in my post on Monday how the “Bauman Affair” challenges Polish democracy. The extreme right is working to turn public debate, to give priority to the politics of retribution for “repressions past,” as it enacts “repressions present.” The comment to the post clearly illustrates this.

But to understand this development, to understand the depth of the challenge to democracy in the recent upsurge of extreme right agitation in Poland, requires a close analysis of its social and political setting, which Adam Chmielewski, the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, one of the sponsors of Bauman’s lecture, explores in his two part post. He provides an informed insider’s analysis of the clear and present danger to democracy and academic freedom in Poland. Part 1 today. Part 2 on Friday.

In today’s post, Chmielewski explains the deep symbolic significance of the lecture in Wroclaw and shows how the right of center mainstream is supporting neo-fascism, both intentionally and unintentionally. While the leader of the main opposition party PiS (Law and Justice), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, openly applauds the “patriotic protesters,” the governing party PO (Civic Platform), a pro-Europe, normal, conservative, neo-liberal party, has supported what Chmielewski depicts as academies for hatred in the extensive development of Poland’s soccer infrastructure. Chmielewski shows how politicized soccer hooligans are the storm troopers of Poland’s far right. In his next post, he deepens his analysis, addressing: the support the new right is receiving on the university, Poland’s relationship with the Nazi legacy, and the ineffectiveness of cultural programs beyond soccer.

I find all this surprising, upsetting and bewildering. I have difficulty in discerning how profound the threat is. I see an unsolved puzzle. The people of Poland have experienced in the last twenty years unprecedented affluence, a well-institutionalized democratic system, and close and creative integration into the European system. In many ways, things have never been better. Yet the ghosts of the past: populism, xenophobia and anti-communist paranoia, added to new demons, homophobia front and center, are on the rise. The political system is now shaky, cultural accomplishment is compromised, and the dark side of nationalism threatens social solidarity and Poland’s relationships with its neighbors, both to the east and the west. In the best of times, the worst of times are on the horizon, a tragedy in the making.

To read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 1,” click here.

The disruption of Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław on June 22, 2013 by the National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski or NOP), has been one of many similar events recently to have taken place across Poland, including the case of Adam Michnik earlier this year, reported here. 

The Bauman lecture was rich in symbolic meaning, organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, an intellectual branch of the present day German Social Democratic Party, the independent Ferdinand Lasalle Centre of Social Thought, and the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, which I chair. Bauman is the most renowned Polish scholar in the world, a great critical social theorist with a long and creative record of scholarly accomplishment. The other hero of the event, in a sense, was Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Breslauer,” a student of the university in Wrocław in its German times, Karl Marx’s collaborator and the founder of the German Social Democratic Party. His remains rest at the Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław. The occasion was to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first social democratic party in the world, established by Lassalle. The topic of the meeting was the ideals of the left, old and new, and the challenges the leftist movement faces nowadays, in the period of a new stage of capitalism and its crisis.

Through organizing Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław, I was hoping for a scholarly and critical debate about the future of Poland, and the world: a scholarly one, because the debate was to be inspired by an eminent thinker; a critical one, as an opportunity for a renewal of egalitarian thinking about economy and politic. While such combination of critique and scholarship is now eagerly seized upon in many parts of the world, in Poland it is met with disdain from political parties which duplicitously present themselves as leftist, and with ridicule or repression from the remaining political parties.

It was the second visit by Bauman to the Polish city of Wrocław that I had organized. The first one took place in 1996. On that earlier occasion, no one expected any disturbances to occur during a series of academic and public appearances by the author of Postmodern Ethics. There were also no incidents when Bauman spoke in Wrocław to the European Congress of Culture in September 2011, soon after our city had been awarded the title of European Capital of Culture 2016.

The changes that have occurred in the meantime, in both the Wroclaw’s and Polish public space, that made possible the disruption of Bauman’s lecture and many other similar disturbances, cast a sinister, dark brown shadow upon the image of Poland in the world. But there is one benefit to be drawn from the protests: they demand attention.

A “Set-Up”

The Bauman – Lassalle event was a fusion of Polish, Jewish, German and Leftist culture. Since it was also open to the public, it was perceived by the local xenophobes as an invitation for incitement, a set-up. (This seems to be the closest possible translation of the Polish soccer hooligans’ term “ustawka,” which refers to a collective fight taking place in an agreed place and time between two antagonized group of supporters of different soccer teams, resulting usually in many injuries on both sides, and often in fatalities.)

For Bauman is not only a Polish scholar of great stature in the world and an author quoted in many disciplines. He was also, during the Stalinist period, a military officer of the Polish army, and a Jew, just as Ferdinand Lassalle was. And for the past two decades the ideals of the Left have been misconstrued in Poland as an ideological foundation of the violent communist regime, which murdered patriots, and has been presented as a source of a extreme evil and of the enslavement of the nation.

Just before the commencement of the meeting, quite unexpectedly, the mayor of Wrocław arrived. The organizers of the event invited him to welcome the guest as the host of the city. He managed to say only: “I am Rafał Dutkiewicz. To those who do not yet know it, I would like to say that I am the mayor of this city.”

In response, about a hundred members of the NOP rose from their seats, unfolded a huge banner saying “NOP/Śląsk Wrocław” (Śląsk Wrocław is the name of the local soccer club, currently the champions of the Polish National Soccer League), and started howling, yelling, chanting and vilifying the guest speaker, the organizers, and the mayor alike.

It needs to be said that the soccer club of Śląsk Wrocław is being generously supported by the local municipality under this mayor. Among the chants which were thrown into mayor’s face by the extremist soccer hooligans was a slogan about the memory of the “excommunicated soldiers.” Those soldiers were members of the Polish underground who did not become reconciled with the communist take-over of the post-war Poland, were persecuted by the communist regime, and were banned from the collective memory until 1989. They symbolize a moral and political attitude which is rather close to the mayor’s political views: the municipality ruled by him for the past 11 years has recently erected a monument to one of them, a cavalry officer Witold Pilecki. This material expression of the aesthetic politics of the city aligns well with the political aesthetics dominant in the whole country. Despite the official rhetoric of pluralism, the canons of this aesthetics dictate political tastes in Poland in a way which it is rather impossible, and unwise, to ignore. During the Bauman – Lassalle event, the extreme right confronted not only the left, but also the right.

Canonisation and Escalation

The development of radicalism in Wrocław has been documented carefully for some time now. It has been the subject of a disturbing report by the local Nomada Foundation; everyday xenophobic attitudes have been provocatively revealed in an experiment conducted by the pupils of one of the high schools in the city. There is no doubt that radical groupings in the city act ever more boldly and brazenly. About two months ago, on April 24, they achieved a significant success in preventing Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament, from lecturing at the University of Wrocław. They have exerted a pressure on the organizers of that event, and Cohn-Bendit himself, by wildly calling upon everyone to protect their children from the paedophile. At the last moment, Cohn-Bendit cancelled his journey to Wrocław.

The so-called nationalists in Wrocław and in Poland have been encouraged especially since the moment of the canonisation of their activities by Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the main opposition party in Poland, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice). After a group of soccer supporters staged a violent brawl following a soccer match in Warsaw and after they were prosecuted by the police as well as criticised by the government officials, Kaczyński extended to them ideological and political protection by calling them genuine patriots. Ever since, undisturbed by law, they have engaged in a series of provocations: picked fights at soccer stadiums, disrupted lectures and political meetings, lit fires at the doors of people whom they consider alien, etc.

More than that: thanks to Kaczyński, they have appointed themselves as both the judges of history, and its executioners. The sentences are being carried out summarily, according to their own interpretation of the dominant canons of the political aesthetics. The leader of Law and Justice has strengthened them in their “truth.” The strength of their conviction and the political protection has given them a power, which cannot be matched by any other political movement in present-day Poland.

Interestingly, however, they are being supported not only by Law and Justice, “the patriotic right.” They have also received very strong material support from the present government of Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform), the neo-liberal centre right. The “patriotic right” and the “neo-liberal right” are supporting the extreme neo- fascist right, and this is oddly being facilitated by futbol, soccer.

Soccer and Politics

The rules of ancient democracy are said to have been modeled upon the principles of the Olympic Games. Just as warring Greek tribes temporarily suspended their mutual animosities at the time of the Olympic Games and sent their representatives to Olympic arenas in order to continue their wars in a vicarious form in various sport disciplines, so in democratic Athens each local community sent their representatives to the Assembly to haggle for local interests on their behalf.

In present-day Poland the ties between sports and politics are much more intimate than that. For after one peels off the empty rhetoric and political imagery, it becomes rather difficult to dispel the impression that the Civic Platform’s project of modernization of the country, and the promotion of its interests, exhausted itself, literally, in the organization of the European soccer championship in 2012. Setting subjective impressions aside, however, no one can deny that the Civic Platform, which has been ruling the country for the past seven years, displayed the greatest political energy as long as it was preparing the whole country for this spectacle, and lost it, immediately and completely, after the show was over.

Accordingly, Poland owes to this party more than two thousand (!) small sports playgrounds, located in almost every local community. They are known as Little Eagles and cost 1,233,477 Polish zloty each [373,781 USD]. Their aim is to train the young soccer talents, but also to fill the leisure of the young who now have the opportunity to enjoy it more than ever, as 30 per cent of them have no jobs. We owe to this party also four large cutting-edge stadiums in Gdańsk, Poznań, Warsaw and Wrocław, as well as barely passable roads built in order for us to be able to drive to them, even though, as yet, two years after their near-completion, there is really no good reason to do so.

It is difficult to dispel the impression that Civic Platform never intended to govern the country in a democratic manner, through some kind of a covenant with society. It just wanted to manage and administer society by means of sports. Conceiving politics as a spectacle, the party fused politics with sports in an unprecedented way. Apparently the leadership of the party assumed that the Little Eagles and the stadiums would become centers of sporting rivalry, entertainment and cultural events, venues to excite positive passions, and to discharge them. They seem to have assumed also, apparently judging after themselves (the leadership of the Civic Platform, most especially the prime minister Donald Tusk, are well-known and devout soccer players themselves.), that through holding the EURO 2012 in Poland, they would receive a powerful means of promotion of the country in Europe and in the world. They seem to have thought, too, that in this way they would acquire a powerful instrument to manage human masses, their leisure, emotions, and thoughts.

On all these accounts the Civic Platform suffered major defeats, because their assumptions turned out to be erroneous. It is, moreover, rather surprising to see a conservative party working upon such assumptions for they are reeking with optimism untypical of the conservative attitude, which is an important strand within its ideology. The soccer infrastructure, by far the most important contribution of this party to the growth of Poland, has now become a symbol of the failure of its modernization project.

Managing human masses by means of stadiums, a political technique employed prominently in the ancient Rome, has its known limitations. One of them is that sport creates strong divisions between “us” and “them.” The divisions thus fashioned are focused upon sports rivals and are symbolized by differing colors marking the armies of such substitute wars. Sport as a vicarious war enables the discharge of the passions aroused by rivalries in a controlled manner. This, however, works well only in countries in which their populations, as well as their authorities, are still capable of grasping the difference between sports and politics, not everywhere.

The leaders of Civic Platform have been apparently using outdated textbooks for political marketing. For despite the perfection of the instruments designed to manipulate public passions, they remain unpredictable. Civic Platform has been acting as if they have forgotten about this critical fact. They have apparently forgotten also about the unparalleled wisdom of the great Polish philosopher and the most successful soccer coach ever, Kazimierz Górski, who famously said that in the game of soccer “the ball is round and there are two goals in it.”

As a result of these astounding oversights on the part of the Civic Platform, the passions of the soccer supporters, for whom this party has laboriously built the stadiums, have been effortlessly hijacked by Law and Justice and are now being informed according to a xenophobic ideology rather than the conservative-liberal one. In other words, the political soccer match arranged by the Civic Platform for the whole nation has been easily won by opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński. An unequaled champion of political acrobatics, Kaczyński has shot a penalty goal against Prime Minister Tusk without even going onto the pitch. It is a wholly different matter, though, whether he will be able to benefit from his victory. Something truly pernicious has been unleashed.

By undertaking the modernization project by means of soccer, Civic Platform has transformed a huge stream of taxpayers’ money into an expensive concrete infrastructure, instead of devoting themselves to building instruments of inclusion of broad segments of the population, which for the past two decades have suffered economic and social exclusion. This project has enriched the bosses – though not the workers – of the Polish construction industry; for, this was in fact one of the main reasons for the Civil Platform to undertake it in the first place. After Civic Platform loses the upcoming elections, the bosses, ever hungry for more, will support the Law and Justice without any qualms.

As a result, the stadiums have become venues of concentration and recruitment of new members of extreme right-wing groupings, and into training areas of the soccer hooliganism. Instead of becoming centers of family entertainment and popularization of culture, Polish stadiums are now functioning as academies of hatred for the young who are just beginning their adult life, but have already lost their hopes for a decent place for themselves in their own country.

The xenophobic radicals, fed from both political hands, are gradually ceasing to be a marginal eccentricity of Polish political aesthetics, and a minor symptom of the psychopathology of Polish political life; they are now becoming an independent and vigorous political power. We do not yet have Budapest in Warsaw (These words have been used by Jarosław Kaczyński to express his admiration for Victor Orban and his authoritarian transformation of Hungary), but we will not have to wait too long for it. The incident at the University of Wrocław and many similar ones demonstrate that Poland is dotted by various local infections of virulent nationalism.

That the promotion of Poland through soccer did not work was due not only to the desperate weakness of the Polish national team. However hard we work in order to organize efficiently the spectacles of the politicized sport, several incidents like the one during Bauman’s lecture, will suffice to annihilate the whole effort to dispel the centuries’ long stereotype of Polnische Wirtschaft.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that even though in antiquity sport was the beginning of Greek democracy, in post-modernity sport has become a beginning of the end of Polish democracy.

On June 22^nd of this year, in the city of Wroclaw, a lecture by Zygmunt Bauman was aggressively disrupted by a group of neo-fascists. When I first read about this, I was concerned, but not overly so. The extreme right has a persistent, visible, but ultimately, marginal presence on the Polish political scene, I assured myself. As a video of the event reveals, there is the other, apparently more significant, Poland that invited and wanted to listen to the distinguished social theorist speak, and cheered when the motley crew of ultra-nationalists and soccer hooligans were escorted from the lecture hall. While xenophobia and neo-fascism are threats in Eastern and Central Europe, I was pretty confident that in Poland, they were being held at bay.

But, after a recent visit to Wroclaw, I realize that I may have been wrong. While there last month, I had the occasion to talk about the “Bauman Affair” with some friends and colleagues. A highlight was around a dinner, though not a kitchen table. I am now deeply concerned not only about the event itself, but also about the political and cultural direction of Poland.

We had a lovely dinner at Hana Cervinkova and Lotar Rasinki’s home. Among the other quests were my colleagues at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute, Elzbieta Matynia, Susan Yelavich, Dick Bernstein and Carol Bernstein, and Juliet Golden, a Wroclaw resident and superb observer of the material life of the city, and her husband, a distinguished craftsman, restorer of among other things of the Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw. The Wroclaw Solidarność hero, Władysław Frasyniuk, and his wife joined us, as did Sylvie Kauffmann, the former editor of Le Monde, who reported extensively around the old Soviet bloc in the 80s and 90s, and now returns as the wife of the French ambassador. The dinner followed a public discussion between him and her. Also joining us was Adam Chmielewski, who as the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław, was one of the co-sponsors of the Bauman lecture.

All were concerned about the Bauman affair, and understood that at issue was not only the talk of a challenging professor. Adam and I had a particularly interesting exchange. I present my side of this discussion today (with which Chmielewski told me he broadly agreed). In our next posts, I will publish his two-part in depth analysis.

My concern is rather straightforward. It has less to do with the quality of the extreme right, reprehensible as it is, more to do with its relationship with the less extremist mainstream. While extremists are indeed at the margins of Polish public opinion, they are becoming more and more effective in making themselves visible to the general public and becoming more acceptable. Politicians are coming to accept the extremists’ definition of controversies and trying to take advantage of their impact, and the media, many public intellectuals and academics are following their framing of events, or at least not forcefully opposing these frames.

Thus, Bauman’s lecture was framed as a scandalous talk by a Stalinist, rather than as a presentation by a distinguished, highly creative social theorist. The disruption was considered as a problem of the legacies of communism and not as a problem concerning the fate of academic freedom in an open society.

Should a Stalinist speak became the question. The quality of Bauman’s work, the importance of his diagnoses of the problems of our times, was put aside. The debate became how the politics of a young man, of a Jewish communist, should be judged, and whether its purported influence needed to be controlled. The fact that Bauman was hounded out of Poland in the wake of an anti-Zionist wave (in that case purported anti-Zionism was really a thin guise for anti-Semitism) was not discussed. The problem of the attempt to silence a critical opinion was not the issue. Rather, the occasion of Bauman’s lecture and its disruption was used to call for the long delayed lustration, a cleansing of communist influence from Polish public life.

There was a smell of anti-Semitism in the air. It seemed that at issue is as well to rid Polish public life of Jewish influence. But perhaps that is my paranoia.

The major opposition party, PiS (Law and Justice) seems to be supportive of the actions of the extreme right, while the ruling party, PO (Civic Platform), seems to be reluctant to too forcefully denounce the right. And intellectuals and professors, even those who privately find the attacks on academic freedom repugnant, are reluctant to speak up. PiS accepts the extremists definition of the situation. PO is reluctant to oppose it, as are many others.

Indeed, PiS seriously entertains wild conspiracy theories concerning the plane crash in Smolensk, in which Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, along with 94 others, including major public figures and civic leaders, were killed. The political paranoia that animates the extreme right is shared by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS leader, the former president’s identical twin brother, and former prime minister, who demonizes the current government as somehow implicated in “the assassination,” purportedly orchestrated by the Russians. Kaczynski has supported the “patriotic protests,” such as the one directed against Bauman, as Chmielewski reveals in his post.

My judgment: PiS seems to me to be quite extremist, though more polite than those who violently chanted against Bauman. Perhaps, Polish fascism with a human face? Probably too strong, but not by much.

Elsewhere, there is not much active direct support of neo-fascists, I trust even among many in PiS. Yet, indirect support and the absence of strong opposition is a serious problem. Thus, Chmielewski’s critique of PO in his post is especially important. He shows how the ruling party unintentionally has supported its far right critics through an apparently benign politics of bread and circuses, and how and why it is not forcefully counterattacking.

I have a playful unprofessional theory about extremism in contemporary politics. Somewhere around 20% of the citizens of just about all contemporary democracies support extreme anti-democratic, xenophobic and racist politics. If these people had their way, democracy would be fundamentally challenged. (Close to home I think of the Tea Party or at least the birthers and the clear Obama haters) The fate of democracy lies in what is done with this margin of the population. Encourage, tolerate or collaborate with this fringe, and a decent democratic politics is undermined or even lost. This is now happening in Hungary. It may happen in Poland.

A major party is in bed with the extremists. The ruling party is not forcefully opposing them. And there does not seem to be a broad civic response against this situation. It is the silence of the centrists, of the “moderates” that I find deafening. I believe, but I may be mistaken, that those on the left are speaking up, but I am not sure that they are being heard, isolated, as they are.

To end on an oblique note of deep concern: I think I see a kind of post-communist treason of intellectuals. It is particularly disturbing, and uncharacteristic of what I have long admired in Polish cultural life. While in Poland, I heard about the calculations of academics surrounding the Bauman affair. There is ambivalence about one of the most distinguished men of Polish letters, supporting him may be dangerous: to do so might compromise one’s career or lead to a weakening institutional support.  Suffice it to say that I admire and support my Polish friends who invited, listened and critically and deliberately considered Bauman’s talk, whether or not they agree with him (as by the way, I don’t on many issues of form and substance). I am disturbed by the problems my friends and colleagues face. There is a clear and present danger, and it is not the specter of communism.