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. . . .
Read more: (Dis)Honoring Zygmunt Bauman in Poland
By Adam Chmielewski, August 17th, 2013 A Systemic Helplessness
Prior to Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture, the event commemorating the 150th 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 . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 2
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 14th, 2013 
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. . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 1: Introduction
By Adam Chmielewski, August 14th, 2013 The Event
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 . . .
Read more: Academies of Hatred – Part 1
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 12th, 2013 
On June 22nd 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 . . .
Read more: The Bauman Affair: A Clear and Present Danger to Democracy and Academic Freedom in Poland
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