Part 2 of Academies of Hatred takes off where Part 1 ended, concluding with a critical account of the present cultural and political dangers facing Poland. Chmielewski links the disruption of Bauman’s lecture to the argument of the lecture. Bauman presented a critique of Poland, and Europe’s more generally, neo-liberal path, and specifically the Social Democrats’ complicity in this. The rise of the xenophobic right is materially a consequence of such policies, Chmielewski maintains. I am not as sure as he is that there is a direct connection between neo-liberalism and the politics of hatred, such politics seems to have a life of its own, but no doubt the production of extreme inequality and the absence of decent life chances for many young people are factors. And as Chmielewski shows here, those who would fight for norms and values that stand as alternatives to the blind workings of the market, those who would work for, to take a key example, the value of free intellectual exchange and the autonomy of the university, do not have the means to fight against direct political assaults and systematic underfunding.

In my piece on the Bauman affair, I warned of a new treason of intellectuals, intellectuals who worried about their security and personal interests and didn’t defend the ideals of free inquiry. Here we see the difficulties: authorities who don’t understand their legal responsibilities to include the integrity of the university, rectors who don’t have the material means to defend their institutions, a minister of higher education who writes a letter against the interference by neo-fascists of the Bauman lecture, but doesn’t formulate policies to address the problem. All of this pushed forward by real intellectual treason, by professors who abandon their role as scholars, who become populist propagandists, such as the one described by Chmielewski, calling for the purge of Stalinists from the university, in full bad faith at the monument of the first king of Poland, Bolesław Chrobry, Bolesław The Great, 967-1025.

Chmielewski sees a rather dark future of Polish academic life: a situation where those with different opinions and identities will feel threatened, where the unconventional will be under siege and protecting the unconventional will become a persistent expenditure. And ironically it will be a lose – lose situation, if the expenditure is made, Chmielewski worries the quality of scholarship under siege is not likely to be very good, while if the expenditure is not made, there will be no scholarship. The new treason of the intellectuals, we see here, has significant social and political supports.

Chmielewski ends on a very pessimistic note, perhaps too pessimistic. After all Bauman gave his lecture and many heard and appreciated it. The University of Wroclaw has not yet closed down, far from it. And Chmielewski has reported on the event. There is resistance to the lessons of the Academies of Hatred. A serious battle rages, and as with the Dreyfus affair, a nation’s future is on the line.

To read Adam Chmielewski’s In-Depth Analysis “Academies of Hatred – Part 2,” click here.

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.

The late Christopher Hitchens had taught at the New School, and several cohorts of students in the Committee on Liberal Studies had gotten to know him well. But those of us who participated in the 2009 Democracy & Diversity Summer Institute in Poland will always remember him from Wroclaw.

The institute had just relocated from Krakow to Wroclaw, an old and booming city in western Poland (formerly Breslau, prewar Germany’s second largest city) to be closer to the challenging issues of an expanding Europe. Hitchens was working on his memoirs, published a year later as “Hitch 22,” and his visit to Wroclaw was a private journey to find out more about his Jewish great-grandmother from Kepno, a small town in Lower Silesia, not far from Wroclaw. We helped him get to Kepno accompanied by the head of the Wroclaw Jewish community, and to get access to archives there.

Hitch was more than generous in return. Long late-night intensive discussions with him were an amazing gift. We talked together about the place, the shifting borders, the shifted populations, the imprint of German Wroclaw, but also of Czech, Austrian, and Polish Wroclaw, and about the remnants of the Jewish past here, the languages and accents heard on the streets, and the social potential of borderlands in the new Europe.

We were walking through the park to Centennial Hall, an impressive modernist structure where Hitchens was to give a public talk, when the news came in from Oxford that Leszek Kolakowski, a youthful Marxist, then a critic of Communism, intellectual godfather of the Solidarity movement, and one of Europe’s most distinguished thinkers had just died.

We did not know that Christopher Hitchens had studied under Kolakowski at Oxford.  He quickly changed the focus of his talk, asked for a moment of silence, and spoke about the impact of developments in Eastern Europe on his generation of British leftist students. It was a magical moment, as it was at once a eulogy for his teacher, for his ancestors from Kepno, and for his youth.

The next morning, as we prepared for a study tour of Lower Silesia, somebody brought to the bus the morning newspapers, with headlines about Kolakowski. During someone’s impromptu translation from the articles so that everyone could hear, Hitch asked loudly, “In what other country would the death of a philosopher be reported on the first page of every major newspaper?!”

I wonder whether he knows that his death was reported on the first page of the New York Times.

We shall miss Hitch’s brilliant mind, scathing wit, and heart.

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 mediated protest against Latifi’s execution, is not so much determined by the results, as important as those are, the failure of the elections, the small victory of the prevented execution.  The very act of people with common principles meeting each other, speaking freely to each other and developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. Arendt’s definition of free public action, is where the real significance is, and it has lasting results. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is a case in point.

The Institute has a heroic past, based in the resistance to Polish Totalitarianism and linked with the New School’s University in Exile, two instances of free creative public action. The University in Exile was established by Alvin Johnson, President of the New School and one of the co editors of the first Encyclopedia of Social Science. In 1933, he worked to establish a special institution of higher education, helping to rescue social science scholars at risk in Nazi Europe, leading to a distinctive academic program that joined European and American social science and philosophy in a creative dialogue.

In 1984, during a special ceremony marking the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile (formally founded in 1934), the New School granted Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident and historian, an honorary doctorate, along with other human rights activists from around the world. He was in jail at the time of the ceremony. Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning poet, accepted the degree for Michnik, reading an excerpt from his famous letter to General Kiszczak, in which Michnik in no uncertain terms denounces the oppressive ruling order and the logic of its Minister of the Interior. A few months later Michnik was released from prison and I went with the President of the New School, Jonathan Fanton, to present Michnik his degree. I spent time with Michnik the week following the official ceremony. We discussed working together to establish a semi-clandestine international seminar on totalitarianism and democracy. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was the first work that was discussed together in Budapest, Warsaw and New York. Maintaining such an activity before the World Wide Web was extremely difficult, particularly given the nature of the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. There were plans to work also with colleagues in Czechoslovakia, but this couldn’t be fully developed. The history of the seminar has not been fully told. I have written some about it, as has Elzbieta Matynia. But what is truly significant is that the history informs our present activities.

Matynia moved the New School from the commitment to this unofficial underground activity to the full development of what is now our Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and our Democracy and Diversity Institute. What brought the German scholars to the New School and what led to the development of the Democracy Seminar animates the Democracy and Diversity Institute.

I am not being sentimental about this. It is a result of ongoing practices, ongoing meetings of people speaking and acting together freely, taking part in a conversation through time, as people do so on Facebook in Iran and in other repressive contexts. Thus, this year’s program includes Ann Snitow’s course on gender. She has been teaching in the Institute for most of its history, underscoring the important connection between gender justice and democratic constitution. Now this not something very controversial, but in the early years of the program it was not easily accepted by many of students from the region. She organized the important Network of East West Women, and in the Institute, she taught problems of gender, and she continues doing this in the transformed global context.  As problems of nationalism emerged in the region, we discussed it and we continue to do so, broadening our comparative focus. As violence, and not just dialogue, determines political fate, we critically examine it.  And as public life is more and more defined through new media forms, we critically examine them. The Democracy Seminar and the University in Exile live in our not narrowly academic activities.

The problematic future of the nation state, its link with exclusionary practices, violence, patriarchy and the like, is one of the topics that we have been discussing at the Democracy and Diversity Institute for years. Last year, Tim Rosenkrantz took part in those discussions in Wroclaw. I am pretty sure that those discussions informed his telling reflections on the recent public action of Jose Antonio Vargas in his post this week. Rosenkrantz is sympathetic with Vargas’s claim to citizenship, but points out the uncomfortable radical implications. I look forward to discussing this in my class in Wroclaw and analyzing the media form Vargas has used to make his public intervention. It’s a long way from the Democracy Seminar, but the media is not the message, the free public action is.