Against Doublethink-Where I Stand Part Two

Neil Clark who, at least, regularly writes about Central-Eastern Europe and the reality of post-communist disappointment and failure rather than the banal triumphalist version of CNN has written on anti-Iranian propaganda this,

As the neocon-inspired propaganda campaign against Iran goes into overdrive, I thought it was time we had a new regular feature: Iran Lie Watch.

For starters: compare and contrast.

The Guardian, 1st January 2010.

David Petraeus says hostage Peter Moore was 'certainly' held in Iran

General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, today confirmed a US intelligence assessment which said the freed British hostage Peter Moore was "certainly" held in Iran for at least some of his 31 months in captivity.

As Moore arrived back in Britain at RAF Brize Norton this evening, Petraeus told a press conference in Baghdad: "I am on the record as having said that our intelligence assessment is that he certainly spent part of the time, at the very least, in Iran."

The First Post, 12th March 2010.

Peter Moore: Iran did not kidnap me

Peter Moore, the British IT consultant kidnapped on May 29, 2007 in Iraq and held hostage for three years by Shia extremists, has spoken about his ordeal. In the first interview about his time in captivity, Moore says he was held in Basra - not in Iran, as many reports had claimed - and denies there was any significant Iranian link to the group beyond some covert funding. He also dismisses the suggestion the kidnap was orchestrated by Iran's Republican Guard, insisting the kidnappers – a group calling themselves the League of the Righteous - were "Iraqi resistance" with "representation" in Iraq's government.

Certainly, the way the USA is using any evidence of supposed Iranian perfidity as a potential list of abuses that might be used as a pretext for either invading Iran or trying to pay NGO "democrats" to open up this oil rich economy to the USA is the wrong way. This is what is happening in Belarus, next door to Poland, though it's concerned with pipelines not people.

The problem is that these Colour Revolutions are designed to empower only pro-US elites,cabals of placemen who aim at privatising Iranian assets into Western hands. This neoliberal "shock therapy" approach only alienates large numbers of the poor and creates mass anger and discontent, as seen in Georgia, and a nationalist backlash.

All that should not, however, act as a defence, by default, of the Iranian regime established by the Ayatollah, one reason I am just as sceptical of Colour Revolutions as of Galloway and the "anti-war" movement in Britain ( at least it's leaders and RESPECT ). As George Orwell wrote those like Galloway are conducting propaganda too as part of what Orwell called "transferred nationalism". Press TV, that Galloway works for, is funded by Iran.

The most pressing need it to expose any pretext for an military invasion of Iran or of lies about the extent of it's nuclear programme which even the IAEA has rejected as having no conclusive evidence of a weapons programme. It should not be forgotten that Iran has a regime that kills and executes homosexuals and is not a state that respects the dignity individuals or human rights.

For some this is not enough, the kind of person who claimed "which side are you on ?". This is question Lenin posed a long time before this ideologue plunged Russia into even further chaos in the wake of the Great War with his mass terror and imprisonment of dissenters in the nascent Gulag growing from Solovetsky Island

The silly notion that an individual person sceptical of all power blocs save that which opposes the power bloc he favours just because they oppose it in nonsensical. Which is what Orwell was getting at with transferred nationalism and doublethink when he wrote 1984. It is easy to quote the word "Orwellian" whilst actually failing pathetically to understand what he meant.

Orwell's vision of 1984 was based on the break up of the world into huge competing power blocks which has happened apace since the end of the Cold War. This does not meant Orwell can be conscripted into US New Cold Warrior campaigns as Christopher Hitchens seems to think that he can or those who support "humanitarian intervention" without looking at the reality.

Orwell was born into a period when the British Empire was at it's maximum extent and, indeed, overstretch. The Ministry of Love was influenced not by Stalin's horrid buildings but by the BBC building in fact and Orwell's frustration was in not being able to get Animal Farm published as it might "offend" the USSR, still an ally at the time.

There is this unfortunately this neurosis in some in Western nations even today from the "anti-globalisers" that because the USA is rampaging around and invading foreign nations for oil and gas, that, therefore, just any power that opposes the US is thus automatically better than the US and all evidence that these regimes are repugnant should be overlooked.

Only a lunatic can believe a regime such as that in Iran that murders homosexuals or mass executes people or treats human like fungible material or "human resources" as the poor are in China or the black new slaves in Africa is a wholly deluded halfwit without any proper grasp of reality. Or 'indifference to reality' as Orwell put it in his Notes on Nationalism.

Everything I have tried to write is in defence of what is valuable about liberalism on the political plane and about the way civil society is a good idea people ought to like to see more of and which is stifled and eroded by unaccountable neoliberal corporatism. If anything in our time there is an increasing convergence between authoritarian "governance" and capitalism of the worst kind.

In 2010 we are dominated by new banal orthodoxies in the West dominated by "think tanks", where those with academic pretensions prostrate themselves before a line, the prescriptions of a creed. NATO, now referred in the lower case to Nato, has transformed itself from a defensive alliance into an offensive one concerned with procuring oil and gas.

Within Britain independent thought is being marginalised by both New Labour and Cameron's NewCons, whilst those who shout and harrangue like Galloway are given airtime because they tap into the need for anger, the need to feel that "socialism" is still a force and there is an alternative. And that he is the "authentic" version of it.

Galloway is not so any more than Christopher Hitchens who thought the US President was fighting a war in Iraq for his reasons. Ironically, Hitchen's wrote a book praising Orwell's bravery and accuracy about what Stalin's hideous totalitarian regime meant, whilst then going on to, if not justify torture, then to rationalise it by the US.

Orwell was subtle enough to know this is the projection on to superpower to carry out a world historical mission that the intellectual, feeling his impotence, believes IT can do what he, the fellow traveller can not. Orwell's Victory is clearly not Hitchens' victory as an uncritical Orwell worshipper who ignores the present context and and has used Orwell's anti-totalitarian and anti-authoritarian stance for his own polemics as well as lacking his moral clarity.

Ironically, supporting hyperpowers uncritically is precisely what many pro-Communist intellectuals believed about the USSR long after it was apparent that it cared for power, domination, and the control of "Eastern Europe". Just as the USA, as is clear from "think tanks" and Brzezinski, wants to dominate Eurasia-which is what the war Poland is fighting in Afghanistan is actually about.

As regards Iran a change is needed. But it must come from democratic Iranians and not US "designer democrats" whether in Belarus or elsewhere on Frum's idiotically coined "Axis of Evil". Nor from the coterie of warmongers and hawks the Benetton style packaged Barack Obama represents, termed by Belarus' Charter 97 as a "saviour".

How that change can be brought about is the crucial question of the epoch we live in. I do not pretend to have the answers to this but there was something dodgy about RESPECT from the beginning. Just as there is about all these Colour Revolutions and use of PR from the time of Edward de Bernays who saw how advertising in capitalist society was more effective than that of Communist regimes.

The opposition to the war in Iraq in 2003 was justified but unfortunately led by the stale remnants a coterie of pro-USSR worshipping creeps like Kate Hudson of CND (now that's Orwellian ) revolved around a slimy demagogue with a line in media and self presentational anger called Galloway and Islamo-Bolsheviks.

So no, they are not answer, provide none and have none apart from ramping up mere hatred.

The great philosopher Alan Watts who made accessible the wisdom of Eastern Taoism once wrote of such people "they hate the hating of hatred-three instead of one" and the promotion of a sane society cannot come that way. Nihilism turned the Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin into a bloodbath.

A coalition of civil society activists opposed both to fake designer PR democrats wanting to grab the resources of states which belong to the people there and horrid totalitarian and authoritarian regimes is the only hope. How and when this will come into effect is an urgent question and I do not pretend to have answers.

Journalism is supposed to be about challenging unquestioned orthodoxies, at least at one level beyond passing on messengers about just "what" is going on. Those journalists like the repellent Seumas Milne of the Guardian are irresponsible by default letting other regimes like Iran off the hook despite their abuses of power and injustices is a spineless and craven act.

The New Captive Mind in Neoliberal Poland

The overthrow of Soviet domination and communism in Poland was a great moment in its history but the record of the Third Republic in both domestic politics and in foreign affairs has been a disappointing experience as it has developed a far too uncritical stance of admiration for US power.

It was necessary for Solidarity to ally with the USA against Soviet domination. Yet it has been a question debated by historians since whether it was Reagan ratcheting up the Cold War rhetoric and supporting Solidarity that brought down the USSR or whether it was the USSR's economic failure the brought down the Iron Curtain.That debate will go on.

What is undoubtedly true is that historians dealing with Poland's connections with the USA have tended to ignore that the idea of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' was a useful tactic when trying to get rid of this one party state that had impoverished and retarded Poland's economy for half a century. However, it does not necessarily mean that in the post-Cold War epoch Poland should support the USA unconditionally.

That has been shown in the way "converted dissidents" such as Adam Michnik now have tranferred their oppositionist stance against the USSR into the belief that US Presidents such as George Bush was fighting a "war on terror" in invading Afghanistan in 2001 for humanitarian reasons and that it also did so when invading Iraq in 2003.

Michnik was under communism not merely a dissident but also a literary person or member of the Polish intelligensia, a man of letters who brought out after his Letters from Prison a follow up sequel Letters from Freedom which contains interviews from Gazeta Wyborcza and with literary figures like Czeslaw Milosz.

That other literary figures such as ex-Candian diplomat Peter Dale Scott supported Solidarity and dedicates his Road to 9/11, Weath, Empire and the Future of America to Milosz, with whom he worked on translating his poetry and that of Zbigniew Herbert into English whilst opposing US Imperialism, tends to get downplayed in Poland.

There is no automatic nor unconditional reason why Poland should be reflexively pro-American simply because it was opposed to the USSR during the Cold War. The Cold War is over and the return of history means a rerun of history back to that of clashing power blocks, conflicts over resources and more realpolitik than Utopian ideology, though it is the US that blends the two now in a dangerous blend of messianic fanaticism that disregards reality.

Milosz wrote his Captive Mind ( 1951 ) to criticise the manner in which the post-World War Two intelligensia tried to rationalise the imposition of Soviet power after Poland was handed over to the Soviet "sphere of influence" by regarding it a the wave of the future and due to the hatred of the capitalism. Yet there was nothing in it suggesting that US style capitalism was the correct alternative to communism.

What is interesting about Milosz's Captive Mind is that, ironically, it could also apply to those who, as Tony Judt points out in Postwar , believed that the US President in 2001 and 2004 was fighting his wars for their ideals of 'humanitarian intervention' and spreading 'liberal democracy' to benighted and repressed people in Afghanistan and Iraq through 'shock and awe'.

Judt argues this was because some members of the Polish intelligensia like Michnik based their support on the idea of general principles instead of scrutinising the actual facts, such as the fact that "Islamofascism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is not one seamless totalitarian threat to the West.

There is a distinct similarity between the "Islamofascist" propaganda and the "New Cold War" trope being sold by Edward Lucas and both are mendacious propagandistic tripe.

Now the entry of Poland into war with the USA in Iraq was barely discussed in the Sejm and both right wing parties and the SLD, then in power under Alexander Kwasniewski, entered the war to show "solidarity" though also, as David Ost wrote in 2004 in The Nation, Poland wanted a cut of the lucrative reconstruction contracts and were peeved when they did not get what they wanted.

The rise of a new Captive Mind has become one of the most sinister features of Poland's elites in the last decade. Independent thought and dissent has tended to be repressed in Poland due to the rise of "think tanks" as well as the confusion of the intelligensia in a Europe that no longer listens to what Michnik actually says any more very much.

That sense of impotence led to those like Michnik to support the Iraq War in the uncritical way apologists for the USSR supported the invasion of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 and reconstitutes what Milosz meant by 'rationalisation' and trying to identify with History just as post-war intellectuals did.

Milosz in The Captive Mind wrote that those supporting the imposition of Communist rule, ignoring the UB repressions and rationalising the existence of the Gulag and the "resettlement East" of Poles from the Eastern borderlands of the old section of Eastern Poland, now in Ukraine and Belarus and Lithuania, as merely "temporary measures" as opposed to a permanent system of totalitarian rule.

Likewise Michnik, who much admired Milosz, has remained silent on the way US power under Bush and continued under Obama has pursued war as a form of "liberation" rather than a last resort and has conducted policies involving torture euphemised as "repetitive administration" and arbitrary transferral by the CIA of "terrorist suspects" in Afghanistan via Poland into Guantanamo Bay.

It is odd that those who admired George Orwell's samizdat editions of 1984 and Animal Farm now no longer remember that Orwell, though anti-totalitarian, remained a democratic socialist and saw the mechanism of power and rationalisation also applied to his criticism of Imperialism, whether applied to the British Empire or the USSR.

What Orwell never dwelt on was the nature of US power in Latin America, which led literary figures and intellectuals like the poet Pablo Neruda from Chile to celebrate the expansion of communism into what was then called "Eastern Europe". Whilst Neruda had no real experience of totalitarianism, what he was against was the USA's belief that Latin America was "it's backyard".

The double standards operated by the USA in it's dirty war against Chile in 1973 and branding left wing social democratic governments and mixed economies in Latin America as "communist" was the template for ill advised meddling in the internal affairs of Latin American states from El Salvador where death squads trained in Fort Benning assassinated Catholic priests like Archbishop Romero in 1980 whilst he was saying Mass.

That was contemporaneous with the rise of Solidarity and its consequent repression by Jaruzelski's regime of Martial Law imposed in 1981, though with far less bloodshed than was visited upon Chile by General Pinochet with the support of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" where some 20,000 were killed as opposed to the few hundreds in Poland. Which makes neither of them right.

The resentment in Latin America to the USA's destruction of democratically elected governments such as that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua prove that the USA could , with the USSR and its KGB, act equally as ruthlessly via the CIA as its global superpower opponent and provide the basis for the radicalisation of revolutionary Marxists.

Those wishing to avoid the dangers of totalitarianism such as Michnik merely made generalised statements about torture and totalitarianism whether of the right or left never being justified.
Yet he fails to accept that the USA is a superpower that wishes to dominate the globe in the way advocated not only by US neoconservatives but also Democratic "liberals" like Brzezinski whose policies in Afghanistan have created bloodshed and killing.

It is the double standards operated by the USA and "the West" which tend to lead to reactive extremism and the populism that Michnik sees as a renascent danger across the world. Yet his lack of economic knowledge ensures that he does not understand that in Poland, like in Russia under Yeltsin, that immiseration caused by neoliberal policies is the central catalyst of these trends.

That can be seen in those like Chavez in Venezuela who trades on opposition to neoliberal IMF policies that reduced states like Venezuela and Chile to poverty, higher levels of social inequality and chaos. Chavez has been championed as he has broken the power of the oligarchies who once controlled access to wealth and privilege via control of the political system.

Whether Chavez will use his power responsibly is threatened precisely by the scale of US meddling and fake "People Power" coalitions like the Sumate, funded by the USA directly because there is no responsible democratic opposition. The communism and populism versus capitalism or "market economy " argument is a false dichotomy.

This interference in Latin America dated back a long time before communism existed to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the threat of Moscow backed "communism" was often used as a pretext to keep these nations as semi-colonies in such a way that it encouraged extremist revolutionary militant committed to violence that Michnik rejects as a way of bringing in a government which retains liberal features.

Yet in recent year extremely doctrinaire theories of economic radicalism, those of neoliberalism, have been used for illiberal social engineering purposes no less than Communism regarded 'the people' and entire nations as laboratories for experimenting with humans and reducing them to their use value, as the trendy neoliberal term "human resources" indicates.

The model for "reforming" the post-Communist economy in Poland was Jeffrey Sach's who worked as an advisor to Solidarity and had pushed through his reforms in Bolivia in the 1980s with the precondition for 'stability' being austerity measures and price increases that would engineer a depression and reconstruction of the economy on stronger lines later.

Sach's reforms worked neither in Bolivia any more than they applied to Poland an entirely different nation in Central Europe where the civil society activism promoted by Solidarity prevented the way unionists and civil society opponents were dealt with in Bolivia: that is by arresting unionists and opponents of President Paz's regime.

As the strikes in 1992 to 1993 were mounted in revolt against "shock therapy", Paz's regime resorted to undemocratic measures unthinkable in Poland as it had been a union, the intelligensia and the heirs to a democratic and free Poland fought for by the wartime Armi Krajowe who had over thrown a communist regime. None of these facts features in Letters from Freedom.

Yet in Bolivia, those who opposed shock therapy were subjected to severe political repression that is unacceptable and justified, like communism was as in the ex-"Eastern Europe", as a measure that would hurl Bolivia into Utopia. As Professor John Gray, the conservative libertarian has commented Utopianism migrated in the 1980s from the left to the political right.

As with all Utopias, the existence of those who oppose perfectionist creeds and neoliberal "Market Leninism" are considered fiendish communists or realpolitik cynics and not those who are devoted to an open society where all political opposition, whether conservative, liberal or social democratic, or even communists, are tolerated.

The fact that Solidarity elites like Michnik did not subject Sachs's schemes to sceptical analysis nor look at the actual facts of what happened in Bolivia ,which Sachs touted as a model economic miracle for Poland, was a major political failing. In Bolivia, the immediate effects of allowing US corporate power over the national economy was an increase in unemployment from 20 to 30%.

Real wages dropped 40% whilst prices increased and then wages dropped again later by 70% of their previous level. In 1985 the average per capita income of Bolivia was $845. By 1987 it had plummeted to $789. Average income calculations concealed, as they have done in Poland, the growth of vast levels of super rich and an underclass of peasants and unemployed.

In reaction to criticism that "shock therapy did not actually work", Sachs opined "Look, all this gradualist stuff doesn't work. When it goes out of control ( the economy ) you've got to stop it, like a medicine. You've got to take radical steps or the patient is going to die". These metaphors of medicinal and emergency shock doctor measures were later used by Sachs in Poland.

The rewards for Solidarity's prolonged struggle against the communist regime was that the IMF refused to give any aid for a huge debt of $40 billion racked up by the PZPR unless accompanied by the medicine that Sach's prescribed for Poland and placed in power by the Communists and George Soros even before the election victory of 1989.

Jeffrey Sachs promised that he could get the IMF to grant aid given his Bolivian miracle and this promise captivated the minds of Solidarity elites who were desperate to do something about hyperinflation and shortages in the shops: the answer was eliminating price control overnight, slashing subsidies and closing and downsizing the mines, shipyards and factories where Solidarity began.

Sachs's ideas chimed with those of Leszek Balcerowicz whose Plan in January 1990 implemented "shock therapy" which, in accordance with Sach's views, was done in a feverish atmosphere of euphoria at having defeated communism and the expectation life would at least get better instead of worse, as it did in the first few years of Poland's "shock therapy".

As Naomi Klein states in her radical work The Shock Doctrine ,

"In Sach's talk of Bolivia, he failed to mention that in order to push forward the shock therapy program, the government had imposed a state of emergency and, on two separate occasions, kidnapped and interned the union leadership-much as the Communist secret police had snatched and imprisoned Solidarity's leadership under state of emergency not so long before"

Due to the conditionality criteria set down by the IMF, that aid of $1 billion would only come if Poland accepted shock therapy, the Solidarity leaders claimed they had no alternative but to follow the revolutionary approach rather than the more gradualist ' social market' approach that Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first PM in a free Poland, had thought a better option.

That went against the whole democratic ethos that Solidarity had been developed upon where the idea was that workers would gain control over co-operative enterprises and a mixed economy between the extremes of US capitalism and Soviet central command state communism would be implemented.

Balcerowicz consciously knew that his belief that there is no alternative, a mantra that has never been challenged as historical and economic orthodoxy in Poland by most mainstream media, "experts" and US trained economists, would only work by deliberately manipulating the Polish public for its own good. Again, this was the way communists thought in postwar war Poland in the 1950s when Milosz wrote The Captive Mind.

As Balcerowicz opined, "extraordinary politics" was a concept where the normal rules of civil society simply do not apply ( that is the "normal politics" of public consultation, discussion and free and open debate ). As with George Soros, 'freedom' and 'openness' is prescribed for everybody else apart from themselves, a caste of experts above the ordinary people.

As with the Communists, the market fundamentalism of Balcerowicz is not one of the 'fundamentalisms' that Michnik dwells on in Letters from Freedom in much detail as his talent was for polemics against communism, totalitarianism, fundamentalism and populism but omitted the economic context that created so much anger and talk of betrayal by ex-Solidarity members.

In 1992, 60% of Poles opposed privatisation for heavy industry and Sachs again used medical analogies that were used by communists who justified amputations of whole parts of society to further progress no matter how much pain it caused the very people without whom Poland would not have been a free nation.

"When a guy comes into an emergency room and his heart's stopped, you just rip open the sternum and you don't worry about the scars they leave...The idea is to get the guy's heart beating again. An you make a bloody mess. But you don't have any choice"

Yet the long term impact of the emergency surgery inflicted long term effects on the health of Poland's body politic, in particular the recourse of anti-communist workers to far right populist demagogues that Michnik merely blethers on about as though they were just atavistic remnants from the pre-war Endek regime of Dmowski that were frozen by the era of communism.

Not once has Michnik mentioned the words "shock therapy" or looked in detail at the Balcerowicz Plan and its suitability for Poland. Instead in Letters from Freedom he focuses on a political polemics based on general principles and without reference to the specifics of the way "shock therapy" was imposed on Poland without democratic discussion or debate.

By 1992 shock therapy had led to a 30% decline in industrial production and with "free trade" being stacked in favour of the 'global investment community' rather than domestic producers, cheap imports flowed in, though still unaffordable for Poles with declining incomes and subjected to unemployment reaching 25%, a level maintained in many areas until EU entry in 2003.

World Bank figures in 2006 revealed that Poland still had an unemployment rate of 20%-the highest in the EU. Some 40% of young people were unemployed in 2006, almost two times the average for the rest of the EU. None of that literally figures in any post-communist history of Poland written either by Adam Zamoyski nor Norman Davies.

In his chapter Liberation 1983-1999 in The Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present, Davies emphasised the political triumphs in bringing communism down but had little to say in about the economic situation beyond claiming the 'transition proceeded with far less pain than might have been predicted'.

Davies claims that the IMF shock therapy 'proved a great blessing' and 'worked to the degree that it put hyperinflation under control almost immediately. The new zloty held steady. Productivity began to pick up in the second half of 1991 and was soon enjoying record rates of 4,5, and enentually 6 percent per annum'.

Compared to the dismal economics of the command economy, neoliberal capitalism was always bound to be more successful but the question is whether the social and economic doslocation it caused to actual Polish people was a 'historical inevitability', a curious position taken by those who opposed the technolological and economic determinism of Marxist-Leninism.

Yet Davies's desire to boost Poland's triumph over communism led him to overlook the real immiseration that neoliberalism of the Balcerowicz Plan created in Poland and how that was directly connected to the way populists like PiS and other right wing splinter groups from the Catholic right were able to capitalise on resentment and anger in a way that held Poland up and made politics a sterile pantomime.

The clipped language Davies used to describe shock therapy belies the sense that neoliberal doctrines, taken to their logical absurdity, obfuscated the manner in which Balcerowicz did, in fact, ram through unpopular "reforms" opposed by many within Solidarity and created a political nationalist backlash and poverty that is unrivalled in the EU.

Davies wrote,

'Central control over all sectors of the economy was abandoned. Privatisation was encouraged at all levels, but first in the financial and industrial sectors. Hyperinflation stopped. Confidence returned. Foreign investment began. International assistance initially from the IMF became possible. Hard times, of course continued'.

Whilst true that 50 years of communist mismanagement was not going to be put right overnight, Davies is wrong to suggest that,

"Democracy encourages short memories. Many Poles were tempted to blame all the deficiencies of the present on the mistakes of current politicians. Few looked back with nostalgia to Communism, although several groups of people such as pensioners, peasants and the unemployed complained bitterly of the meagre benefits of the new order

Their distress was real enough. But they would have been better advised to take a longer view. Life in the new Poland was far from perfect. But most of the more intractable political, social and economic difficulties had to be attributed not to recent policies but to the preceding decades of Communist mismanagement.

It was the neoliberal policies of Balcerowicz were responsible for making a bad situation initially worse and only the fact that Poland was full of highly skilled and talented people and the civil society opposition to the Balcerowicz Plan that ensured that Poland was not to end up the economic basket case that Russia became under Yeltsin as a result of the same proscribed regime of shock therapy in an even more top down anti-democratic manner.

Moreover, there is a contradiction in Davies' logic. The backlash from the populist right and the nastier elements of the Catholic Church, as represented by Radio Maryja, was a direct result of people having been reduced to permanent poverty and looking for a rationalisation for their misfortune. That does not mean anti-semitism was justified but explains why people acted as they did. There was, after all, no alternative politically or economically.

The continued poverty and the World Bank reports of 2006 indicate that if Poles took 'the long view' then the "transition era" could well last more than 17 years. It has continued on after the financial crash of 2008 and the new World Depression that has ensued ( rationalised by neoliberal fanatics as "negative growth", a "downturn" and a "credit crunch".

Moreover, Davies has written nothing since 1999 about the fact that young Poles were so disillusioned with the nation after 14 years of mismanagement and corruption, that over a million voted with their feet to the UK after EU entry in 2003, including highly skilled professionals, so much so that Wroclaw's Mayor set up a Come Home project in London to tempt professionals back.

That is hardly a ringing endorsement for Poland's post-communist "transition" and Polish citizens had every right to demand better from their politicians with the 50 years of communism excuse was wearing thin after 20 years of freedom from Soviet domination and giving vent to the very idea in 2007 of the Kaczynski Twins using lustration laws to scapegoat for communists who made their smooth transition to neoliberal Atlanticists.

What Davies fails to mention is that it was only the abandonment of the shock therapy programme by Solidarity's rank and file that put an end to the Balcerowicz Plan which the economist Joseph Stiglitz in his Globalisation and its Discontents sees as having prevented the economies of ex "Eastern Europe" deteriorating precisely because they was abandoned by 1992-1993.

In Poland, the reason was that Solidarity went on strike in 1992 when there were 6,000 protests against Balcerowicz. 1993 saw 7,500 strikes and by the end of 1993 the plans for the total privatisation of every public asset in accordance with Milton Friedman's idea were abandoned. It was this that led to the saving of jobs, of production plants and the rapid growth of the Polish economy thereafter.

If 'the long view' was taken, the revival of the Polish right wing in PiS reflected the way opposition to the Balcerowicz Plan could take a nasty turn. Kacynski won the 2005 elections by explicitly attacking the rhetoric of the Chicago School as a result of their opponents proposing to "think the unthinkable" and do way with the public pension system and impose a flat tax rate of 15%.

To the extent that the Kaczynski's claimed these neoliberal policies would steal from the poor they were correct but due to their anti-communist fanaticism neoliberalism was seen not as a US project to convert Central European states into new model pupils of IMF orthodoxy but a sinister plot by atheists, homosexuals, Jews, foreigners and commies to traduce Poland. This tedious repetition of rationalisation for failure was a major failure for a democratic Poland.

This is a harsh indictment that after 20 years now a large number of Poles live in destitution and poverty, with the homeless even dropping dead on the street and freezing in January when temperatures plummeted to -20. There are no political parties offering real policy alternatives. Merely the same neoliberalism dressed up in a different PR or "identity politics".

Bibliography
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom
Norman Davies, The Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present
David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
John Gray, Gray's Anatomy
John Gray, Black Mass Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
Tony Judt Postwar

Polish Media Re-Presentation of the War in Afghanistan.

The Krakow Post has reported ( Poles Accused of Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan ) written by an unnamed "Staff Journalist" who is clearly a rather modest individual,

Angry Afghans burned Polish flag after American-led operation

After an American-led attack in the Ghanzi province of Afghanistan, Afghans accused Poles of killing civilians and set fire to a Polish flag, convinced that the operation was headed by Poles. According to a local television station, the villagers blocked the main road from Kabul to Kandahar and set fire to the white and red flag.

The operation in question took place at the end of January in the village of Kalech Jebara. The American special forces were tasked with finding and killing dangerous Taliban militants who were on President Hamid Karzai's list of state enemies.

According to the Afghan villagers, four civilians were killed in the operation, including two children. The local television station then showed a demonstration that took place on the road between Kabul to Kandahar two days after the attack, with over one hundred participants. It was then that the Polish flag was burned.

According to a report in today's Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, this was a joint operation between American and Afghan forces. The newspaper did discover that members of the Polish contingent did intervene, though to what extent it is not clear.

Polish forces are responsible for the security of Ghanzi province, and at the moment there are over 2,000 Polish troops in the area. According to Gazeta, the Polish army leadership is afraid of ruining the good relations it has with the elders in the district of Karabagh, as well as attacks on Poles.

"We were not the ones who killed these civilians, but they accused us, because Afghans associate Ghazni and Karabagh only with Polish soldiers. For them there is no difference between American and Polish his uniform, especially at night," an informant told Gazeta.

In nothing the Krakow Post has written has the real central rationale for the Afghanistan War been publicly debated-the war for access to gas in the Central Asian republics against Russians China, the new "Great Game" which reflects not a "New Cold War", as Edward Lucas of The Economist insists for purely propagandistic reasons.

It matters little whether Poles or Americans killed the Afghan civilians that angers Afghan villagers. For as part of NATO, Poland has maintained the most uncritical view of the wisdom of continuing the war in Afghanistan which Brzezinski is justifiably afraid could turn into "another Vietnam". This is a NATO War with Poland and the USA "standing shoulder to shoulder".

Well, when decided to covertly fund the mujahadeen in the late 1970's to give the USSR ,"it's Vietnam", Brzezinski contributed to the chaos that Afghanistan has endured ever since.

It would be interesting to know why the Krakow Post, when serialising sections of the new authorised biography by Patrick Vaughan of the TransAtlantic MA program at Jagiellonian University in 2009, omitted this and the role of oil and gas. The biography has not yet appeared in Krakow bookshops.

Well, civilian deaths are considered a necessary form of 'collateral damage' in a war being fought for hard headed realpolitik and the construction of the TAPI pipeline which is the only reason troops from Poland are still there and have been increased in accordance with the request for Poland to send more troops. Just at the time Obama was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2009.

The hard facts are that Poland faces an energy crisis and want to wrest as much control from Russia over oil and gas as possible by diverting it south and incorporating Afghanistan as a client state, rather as Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgia has been with an increase in ethnic conflict and irredentism in South Ossetia.

Again the Polish public are never given access to the hidden agenda of the Afghanistan War as the Polish Defence Minister Klich and Prime Minister Donald Tusk repeat robotic sentences and clipped Orwellian statements about "credibility" i.e ( imposing power successfully ) and perverting the word 'solidarity' in the context of a military occupation.

The enhanced role of Poland in Afghanistan in Ghanzi province is to secure the area between Kabul and Kandahar where most of the fighting going on against Taliban insurgents are killing British and Canadian troops. Polish troops are also stationed in an area that needs to secured for the pipeline not to be threatened by Taliban insurgents.

This is the exact route for the TAPI pipeline to go through. This is not a conspiracy theory it is documented by the petro-economist and oil pipeline experts such as John Foster in his tract Pipeline Through a Troubled Land. Foster, who has worked for BP and other oil corporations knows what he is talking about.

Afghanistan has been rationalised by reference to all manner of shifting pretexts, -liberating women, defeating the heroin trade, protecting the West from Islamist terror. Yet the reality is that the West has a stake in making Afghanistan a pipeline state. That plan was always, literally, in the pipeline at the outset.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is candid about this, though like most 'democratic geopoliticians' he dresses it up in arcane terminology, as if geopolitics was an exact science. "Think tank experts" regularly debate it on their websites such as the Heritage Foundation. Making this knowledge public puts flesh of the concept of 'civil society', something which should be better promoted by the media.

Yet the Polish public, that is the children or the animals on Animal Farm, are never told being regarded, as the founder of journalism in the USA as PR, Walter Lippeman once called, a "bewildered herd". This contempt for people's intelligence is reflected in the way gas is not seen as worthy of even the slightest mention.

The facts pertaining to why Polish troops are dying in a futile war and Afghan children being incinerated by bombs dropped from US aircraft, especially at the beginning of the war when "force protection" was paramount. This is hardly a strategy for "winning hearts and minds" first termed WHAM during the Vietnam War.

It needs to have Turkmenistani gas go through Afghanistan via the TAPI pipeline to retain the chance at gaining hegemony in Eurasia, a central aim in Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard ( 1997 ) which aims, amongst other things, at preventing collusion between China, Russia and Iran with regards the oil and gas of the Caspian.

Once this is detailed and admitted to be the driving force behind NATO's quest for energy security then the discussion might move on from trivial outrage about what Western liberal elites are doing to a real consideration about it's overdependance of fossil fuels lying in dangerous regions of the world.

For the simple reason that we have built a consumer economy and illusions of continued economic growth and 'progress' around controlling a resource destined to diminish and that will inaugurate an epoch of pathological struggle over them. Those interested in a sane world where the tendency towards war is minimised should be given more role in the debate. Not excluded.

It is of no use pretending that resource conflicts and geopolitical calculations are somehow detached from the energy intensive lifestyles a great majority of people in the West have taken for granted and believe is theirs by right. They are not, however, when the high octane economy on the US model has been adopted by Poland, the overreliance on the car and fetish for SUV's

Those flying EasyJet into Balice will not be able to make the connection between high octane lifestyles and Afghanistan when reading the Krakow Post which is presented for free to those entering Krakow via Pope John Paul II's Airport. In which case what is the point of raising the Afghanistan War or Brzezinski in a paper about Krakow ?

Wars in far off nations will become far more prevalent in future years because of the reliance on the car, the belief that democratic legitimacy is based on giving the masses what they "really want" through cheap air travel, the right to buy out of season fruit, to use the car to go to shopping malls and so on.

If people are not prepared to make the link between their lifestyles and what the politicians and statesmen have to do to allow 'business as usual' ,then it had better get used to Afghanistan and Iraq ans the possibility of endless war and the increasing threat of terrorism being projected into Europe and the USA.

As well as the threat of Al Qaida terror within the West. The terrorist threat was actually partly caused by those like Brzezinski who came up with the idea of destabilising not just the Soviet Union but also by funding Central Asian Islamists in the 70s as revealed by Peter Dale Scott in his excellent The Road to 9/11, Wealth , Empire and The Future of America.

Scott was a Canadian diplomat during the time of the Vietnam War and an intimate colleague with Czeslaw Milosz at Berkeley University whose poetry he helped to translate into English and aid the cause of speading a knowledge of Poland's poet of Solidarity to the English speaking world. He is not just an "anti-American" hard left anti-war type. He supported Solidarity.

Yet these facts about Brzezinski's irresponsible use of US power and geopolitics are confined to the memory hole in Poland where the main architect of trans-atlanticism, in this now wholly pliant satellite state venerate him as participating to Poland's liberation whilst "stirred up Muslims"don't matter.

In Nouvel Observateur ( January 15-21, 1998 issue ), Brzezinski admitted that he and the and CIA director Bill Casey had come up with up the idea of trying to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by providing covert aid via the Pakistani intelligence services to the mujahadeen.

"What is most important to the history of the world?....The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

That their deaths are rationalised according to doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" made those supporting the effort to aid Afghanistan via NGO's well intentioned but naive in believing that Bush and Cheney were fighting a "war on terror" to advance human rights, that is for their reasons not the actual hard facts-geopolitics and resources.

As John Foster puts it in Pipeline through a Troubled Land,

The proposed TAPI pipeline follows an ancient trading route from Central to South Asia. It will run from the Dauletabad gas field in Turkmenistan along the main highway through Herat, Helmand and Kandahar in Afghanistan; through Quetta and Multan in Pakistan; to Fazilka in India, near the border between Pakistan and India. Helmand and Kandahar are the provinces where safety and security are problems and where British and Canadian forces, under the NATO umbrella, are involved in combat alongside U.S. forces.

Afghanistan’s new National Development Strategy (2009-2013) – presented at a donors’ conference on June 12,2008, in Paris – refers briefly to ongoing planning for the TAPI gas pipeline and to Afghanistan’s central role as a land bridge connecting land-locked, energy-rich Central Asia to energy-deficient South Asia.

“Afghanistan is also participating in ongoing planning for a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI)natural gas pipeline. A number of regional energy trade and import arrangements have commenced and will contribute to long-term energy security.”

“Enhanced regional cooperation provides Afghanistan an opportunity to connect land locked energy rich Central Asia with warm water ports and energy deficient South Asia. As a result of this expanded trade Afghanistan would be able to meet part of its energy demand.

As a transit country, Afghanistan will realize increased revenue and enhanced economic activity, enabling it to better meet its main development challenges.” (page 143).

Guarding the pipelines is now an explicit NATO aim,

"Energy has become an issue of strategic discussions atNATO, and the issue was reviewed at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest. The Summit Declaration affirmed that NATO will support the protection of critical energy infrastructure,and stipulated that a progress report on energy security be prepared for the 2009 Summit"

Two years earlier, the 2006 Summit Declaration avowed support for a coordinated effort to promote energy infrastructure security.

One proposal at the 2006 Summit called for NATO to guard pipelines and sea lanes. Would that apply to the Afghan pipeline? If so, NATO troops could be in Afghanistan for a very long time. Pipelines last until they’re decommissioned– that may be 50 years or more".

This will be part of a long war. How long is the liberal political and media elite going to be in denial about the pipeline and those three letter words 'oil' and 'gas' which seem to play a role a bit like 'sex' did in Victorian times as regards it's unmentionability ? Perhaps, as it causes a feeling that the rationalisations for war were never as "humanitarian" as were once made out.

Adam Michnik-The Useful Idiot in the "War on Terror"

The transition period between 1990 and 2010 and "ongoing" in Poland has also seen the transition of Adam Michnik from a fearless dissident into a hack propagandist for the "War on terror" is one of the signs that a number of the Solidarity elites no longer understand post-communist world they now inhabit.

Michnik's connections to Krakow stem from the obvious fact that he is a celebrated fighter for an independent Poland against Soviet dominated Poland, something that was needed at the time. Now he just turn up to collect honorary doctorates and does some book signings in Empik or does TVN appearances.

In the years 1980-1981 he was advisor to the Independent Trade Union “Solidarity” leaders in the Mazowsze region and the “Solidarity” Workers’ Committee at the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta near Krakow.

Constantly arrested, he was sentenced to internal exile on December 13, 1981, to be allowed outof prison as a part of an amnesty in 1986. Michnik participated in the Round Table talks of 1989 and by 1991 had retired from politics.

However, as editor of Gazeta Wyborcza his track record of supporting an uncritical adulation of the USA, being close friends with another ex-Trotskyist turned into an apologist for the USA's "War on Terror" has irreperably dented his status as an opponent of torture and totalitarianism. The idea of "living in truth" seems to have been replaced by "living in silence" about the USA.

This is not to make the absurd suggestion that the USA is turning into some totalitarian state but Michnik has basically reneged on his belief in "speaking truth to power" if that power happens to be the hyperpower which stands, despite it's "mistakes" in the past, for a universal and beneficient force for Good.

Yet Michnik is now confined to criticising PiS as sharing the paranoid mindset of the PZPR which used the idea of "enemies within" and who are now not blatantly "the Jews" but secret Communists and "collaborators" used as scapegoats the consistent economic mismanagement and social atomisation and unemployment rates as a legacy of a Communist outlook.

Whilst Michnik is on form when targeting much of the stupidity of PiS and the right wing populists that split off from Solidarity adter 1990, it never occurs to Michnik that this atavistic nationalist backlash was a consequence of his own policies nor that his support for US superpower and neoliberal economics is also a legacy of the Communist inheritance.

As Mark Almond wrote in Who's Revolting Now ? ( 2002 ) on the way communism was succeeded by an extreme form of market fundamentalism which just added insult to an already injured and damaged society in Poland.

Exhausted by decades of Soviet-style communism and, with their low birth rates, hardly able to replenish the population, East Europeans may lack the vitality to rebel against further decades of western-imposed austerity - particularly as so many believed that the western model would make them all rich quickly.

Poles used to rise when the price of sausages went up, as they did in 1956, 1970, 1976 and 1980. But since 1989, post-communism, with its deflation of expectations, has knocked the stuffing out of them.

With vast sections of the once militant working class on the dole or reduced to penury, wives of ministers talk like arriviste Marie Antoinettes, one remarking that conversation in Polish society has become so advanced that people ask not what sort of mobile phone you have, but whether you have an ISDN connection.

However, Almond in 2007 in The Price of People Power in the Guardian went slightly too far in suggesting that, in relation to the "shock therapy and IMF "conditionality" austerity measures and cuts that were setto occur in Ukraine after the "Orange Revolution", as happened in Poland under Leszek Balcerowicz, that

"His Agora media empire grew out of the underground publishing world of Solidarity, funded by the CIA in the 1980s. His newspapers now back the war in Iraq, despite its huge unpopularity among Poles."

Bronislaw Geremek reacted furiously in the British Guardian newspaper by mentioning his doing time in prison, as if that automatically made him a paragon of virtue, but did mention the fact that Michnik was not motivated to "sell out" by considerations of profit.It was really a part of his collossal vanity and his desire to identify himself with History.

Geremek correctly noted that Almond had indeed omitted "to note that Michnik is not the owner of Agora, and that when the company gave shares to its founders and employees, Michnik refused to take any. And that the Iraq war is the subject of fierce debate in Gazeta Wyborcza". But Michnik still did support the war.

Yet equally what Geremek omitted is that Poland was one of the few members of the "coalition of the willing" under Kwasniewski of the SLD to enter the Iraq War in 2003 without any discussions, challenges or real debate in the Sejm as most Poles were diverted by careful "public diplomacy" which focused the media and politics on Poland's entry into the EU.

Michnik as a fearless opponent of Soviet totalitarianism merely supported the Iraq War as editor of Gazeta with unquestioning belief in the propaganda put out by the Bush administration that this was a war of liberation whilst Geremek made dithering statements in the EU Parliament later about it leading to a potential rift between the USA and the EU ( especially France and Germany )

None of that practical politics mattered any more for Michnik inexorable spread of US power across the globe as a universal force for Good. No matter what the USA has done, Michnik will support it if can be justified by recourse to Human Rights, credulously buying the notion that Iraq was fought about that as opposed to an oil grab.

Or, as he puts it somewhat more fawningly and subserviently as any Polish People's Republic crony loyal to Moscow during the days of Soviet Communism would have put it, with regards invading Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, on the issue of supporting the invasion of another state to icorporate it into an Ideological Empire

"Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it".

The irony of this is that such a posture is very similar to those Western fellow travellers who gave their unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union, despite all their knowledge of the Gulag, the mass extermination of 'kulaks' during collectivisation and the systematic policy of state terrorism.

Michnik could not have been unaware that George Bush after 9/11 had flouted international law by claiming that "illegal combatants" were not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention and thus could be held as 'ghost detainees' at Guantanamo Bay after being subject to 'extraordinary rendition'.

Michnik's silence on that is startling as such Orwellian language recalls the abstruse jargon of power and dehumanisation used by totalitarian regimes. He has written nothing on this, in fact remained silent on the unfolding catastrophe of Iraq where the level of deaths has now reached over a million people according to a thorough study by the Lancet journal.

The problem with Michnik is that his anti-totalitarian ideology can lead him to conflate Communism and Nazism with the idea that there is some monolithic Islamic totalitarian or "Islamofascist' threat, a position very similar to Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American so-called "public intellectual" .

Both Hitchens and Michnik are close associates who often lunch together in New York, as Hitchens reveals in his essay 'The Old Man' in his book Love, Poverty and War where he venerates Trotsky for his anti-totalitarian and anti-Stalinist stance, the very same politics that dates back to their involvement in the 1968 upheaval on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

As with Hitchens, who 'took a stand' after 9/11, so too did Michnik come to see the USA as waging a global "battle for civilisation" under George Bush.

"I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11".

The self-presentational and mock heroic dramatic upthrust of this foolishly conceived mission statement is curiously unbalanced. Like Hitchens, Michnik is taking upon himself a world historical pose that shows that the romantic liberation role as a '68er' and founder of Solidarity has gone to his head.

Moreover, the utter idiocy of yoking together Al Qaida and Iraq, a fanatical Islamist network of terror cells with the decrepit secular state of Baathist Iraq, can only occur where all opponents of the USA who use terror are regarded as part of one seamless existential enemy. Such a misconcieved ideology only ramps up the potential for a 'clash of civilisations'.

Michnik's potted view of history is crude and oversimplified, absurdly seeing Al Qaida as part of some spectrum of horror that necessitated any such invasion of the Middle East as it saw fit to preserve the liberty and security of the West.

In We the Traitors (March 28 2003 ) in Gazeta Wyborcza, Michnik responded to criticisms , by aa German journalist in Die Tageszeitung who claimed he had become an indiscriminate admirer of the USA when signing a letter declaring his full backing for the invasion of Iraq. That he had uncritically supported the Iraq War with met with a wholly blathering and incoherent response,

.....just as the great Moscow trials showed the world the essence of the Stalinist system; just as “Kristallnacht” exposed the hidden truth of Hitler’s Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge.

Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values.

This is not the place to analyze the ideology that, while disfiguring the religion of Islam, creates a crusade against the democratic world.

Saddam Hussein takes part in this just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. He asserts that in the holy war with the “godless West” all methods are permitted. Waiting for this sort of regime to obtain weapons of mass destruction would be plain recklessness.

In fact, Michnik's polemic in defence of the Iraq War was precisely the place to discuss the "the ideology" of what is commonly referred to as Islamism, in the name of freedom of information and intellectual clarity as opposed to pure propaganda. Thus proving that Michnik seems to have forgotten that this is what freethinkers and writers like George Orwell did.

Using the word "crusade" with regards Saddam inverts the truth on it's head. One reason Bin Laden began to target the USA was because the it promised to station troops in the Holy Lands of Islam in Saudi Arabia only on a temporary basis and got the Saudi regime to reject Bin Laden sending in jihadists to get rid of a secular Stalinist style dictator he hated.

Moreover, though Saddam was a brutal tyrant, he did not possess WMD and so makes a farce of Michnik's rhetoric about Saddam 'being at war' with the West alongside Al Qaida when Saddam only borrowed jihadist language during the First Gulf War in 1991 to prop up sympathy and support in Arabic countries.

Michnik has just assumed that because Saddam was a totalitarian dictator then that was the reason he must have or be trying to possess WMD that could be used to attack the West. But the comparison had no basis in reality. Iraq in 2003 has no similarity to Hitler's Germany, an industrial powerhouse at the centre of Europe nor Stalin's rapidly industrialising Soviet Union.

Nor have any weapons of mass destruction been found since the USA invaded Iraq as the nation had had most of its military capacity smashed during the First Gulf War of 1990. The USA, fearful that Hans Blix would find no WMD, decided to pre-empt the conclusion of the inspections would not find any by invading.

The conflation of all "Islamist" enemies of the USA from Al Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban etc as part of one demonological continuum perhaps reflects the dangers of Michnik's belief that Poland in concert with the USA can act as a Redeemer Nation, liberating the world's benighted people from tyranny everywhere.

Partly this neoconservative foreign policy is a form of what has been termed an "Enlightenment fundamentalism" that like Fukuyama sees history as moving towards a new global world order controlled and overseen in its birth pangs by the USA, where all nations will be freed and interconnected by neoliberal ideas of 'free trade' marketised societies and shared secularism.

To be fair to Michnik, at the 2009 Freedom and its Adversaries Conference in Prague, sponsored by Coca Cola amongst other corporations, he agrees with Jacques Rupnik that those

....who use the language of freedom and form part of the democratic transformation, but who discard the legacy of the dissident movement and the excessive spread of liberalism put the state in a position of the enemy and led to untransparent privatization and unrestricted greed. “We chose the quickest way – that of imitation.”

Yet Michnik was not so keen on Rupnik's perceptive view, as he was responsible for supporting the Balcerowicz Plan that imposed the "shock therapy" first tried and tested in Pinochet's Chile under the influence of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys", the very nation where Michnik had made it clear that torture was immoral no matter who did it.

Brutal power is equally repugnant whether executed under a red banner or a black one. The belief that there was no rightist or leftist torture, no progressive or reactionary torture, was a fundamental principle we lived by.

The German journalist accuses us of not being concerned about the Bush policies that lead to the suppression of humanitarian principles in international relations.

Certainly we are unsettled, but we believe that what leads to the destruction of humanitarian principles is rather the tolerance of totalitarian regimes and the cowardly silence about the crimes of the dictatorships in Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Cuba.

In his defense of the Iraq War, Michnik's propaganda dissolved into banal and windy generalisations and banal and oblique assertions about torture unworthy of something that a true dissident rather than what Poles call a "gadula" ( warbler ) would write in relation to it both in Chile, through supporting Pinochet, and continued into Afganistan and Iraq directly by the USA.

What both Chile and Iraq had in common was the idea of what the radical writer Naomi Klein calls "the shock doctrine" where whole societies are subjected to rapid political seizures of power, the demoralisation of forces in civil society to have time to group against rapid measures of neoliberal policies that take control of resources and against the wishes of the citizens of a state.

As the Freedom and its Adversaries Conference reported,

Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, partially subscribed to Rupnik’s view on the emptiness of democracy. He warned of corruption leading to nihilism, cynicism and fundamentalism, not only religious or ethnic, but also market fundamentalism.

The reason Michnik did not fully support Rupnik was because he supported the neoliberal reforms and then tried to criticise only the symptoms of the economic system that bred the nasty backlash in the form of PiS and nationalist politicians he has railed against since, even hyperbolically claiming that Kaczynski's government in 2007 might try a coup d'etat.

Michnik could not claim that he was wholly unaware of the fate that would await the workers who made Solidarity such a popular force for peaceful and democratic change. His contempt for them was manifest by the time that it was known that the days of Jaruzelski's regime were limited as was the power of the USSR.

As David Ost has shown in his The Defeat of Solidarity ( 2005 ) by 1985 Michnik was already in Takie Czasy (These Times ) launching an attack Polish workers for being impetuous and irrational in believing strike action could bring about change alone without being guided by those who knew what was best.

Ost writes that Michnik believed that

"Far from being the guarantor of democracy, labor activism is one of the main dangers to democracy. The rational elite, he argues, would have to take the place of workers in the Solidarity leadership if the organization was truly to be the agent of democratic transformation".

The stage was already set for casting the extras in the film version of the Great Revolution against a degenerated and corrupted Communist state aside and giving due weight to the leading stars like Michnik who since 1990 has done little but boast about his role in history. As Ost puts it,

"In 1980 we might, he argues, to have thought about them as sensible and rational actors. In fact they are really irrational hot heads, hostile to reason and common sense, contemptuous of the notion of the compromise, and incapable of recognizing the 'limits and realities' of the real world.

The effects of shock therapy in Poland were drastic and immediate in 1990. With the Communist system crumbling after decades of mismanagement, with a debt of $40 billion and inflation at 600%, the Washington based IMF rewarded solidarity by refusing to give it any aid unless it privatised vital public assets into the hands of Western investors

What Michnik and other like Geremek did not want was to tell the workers who had supported and made Solidarity and the victory over Communism possible was that the USA had demanded "reforms" that would trade off the debts incurred by a totalitarian regime it had never voted for in return for selling off state assets like mines, shipyards, and and factories at knock down prices.

The fact that many workers , union leaders and Solidarity members objected to the "shock therapy" advice of Jeffrey Sachs and the Balcerowicz Plan which liberalised all price controls overnight on January 1 1990 was not a matter for debate from the "irrational masses", though Michnik had his 'doubts' about it at the time about "whether it would work".

Yet Balcerowicz was a staunch admirer of Milton Friedman who had advised Pinochet on a revolutionary rupture from the past and to evade the need for obstacles like the unions, 60% of whom opposed the adoption of a radically privatised economy with virtually no state provision as a mechanism that would motivate entrepreneurship and a business boom overnight.

So the price of "reform" was a $1 billion stabilisation loan negotiated by Sachs based on rushing through reforms that the majority had been opposed to in the first free elections after the demise of the PZPR. Balcerowicz termed this anti-democratic measure as "extraordinary politics" which he later went on to define as,

....a period of very clear discontinuity in a country's history. It could be a very deep economic crisis, of a breakdown of the previous institutional system, or of a liberation from external domination ( or end of war )In Poland, all three phenomena converged in 1989 ( allowing ) "a radical acceleration of the legislative process" ( i.e a shock therapy package ).

As the Tory historian Mark Almond commented with Swiftian ire on "Market Leninism" in Central Europe,

Adam Michnik used to joke that "all communists are reformers" - but so are all post-communists. It is just that the bright dawn of prosperity for all always shimmers just over the horizon. After 1989, top dissidents and the communists who jumped ship to join them did well out of adopting "the market economy" and occupying its commanding heights.

But mass unemployment and cuts in health and social services have plunged people into poverty. Real wages have fallen and birth rates have collapsed across eastern Europe. The children of the 1980s - the last generation born under communism - are voting with their feet as they flee west, just as their parents dreamed of doing.

Curiously, the idea of 'limits and realities' that allowed such "freedoms "did not get applied to Iraq apart from in trying to privatise its oil concessions into the hands of US corporations, breaking up the state and parcelling out the nation's resources whilst it descended into anarchy, bloodshed and chaos.

Nor has it applied to mentioning the way IMF economists impoverished Russia in immiseration throughout the 1990s by applying wholly inappropriate policies leading to the death of over a million Russians according to Lancet Medical Journal, the same one that investigated mortality rates in Iraq.

Nor have limits and realities been evident on the War on Terror which Michnik has also supported as a global crusade of simplistic Good versus Evil which gave the USA the right to resort to pre-emptive measures to arbitrarily imprison and torture people in Afghanistan, whether they were "terrorist suspects" or Pakistani taxi drivers.

Michnik has maintained his silence on the now proven fact according to the Open Society Justice Initiative and The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights that Poland allowed CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights six times between February and October 2003. Clearly, the torturing of Muslims by "repetitive administration" is part of a war for human rights.

That news comes now as Iraq falls from the headlines and after successive governments whether of the SLD, PIS or PO lied continually that they had not been. Clearly Michnik's description of himself as a "Converted Dissident" makes sense in this light. Nor once has he mentioned this or broken the silence.

Yet the ideology of 'solidarity between Poland and the USA is also important in that the American Revolution happened at the same time in the late eighteenth century with the help of Polish rebels like Kosciuszko who then went on to fight for freedom against Russia against the plans for the Third Partition of Poland that happened in 1795 when Poland lost its independence for 123 years.

The Polish messianic myth goes back deep into Polish history and comes from Michnik's reading of the poet Adam Mickiewicz who in Dziady saw the liberation of Poland as essential for the downfall of all Evil Empires everywhere ( by which he thought of as the European powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia that had partitioned Poland in the late eighteenth century ).

Indeed, Michnik's decision to be part of KOR, the Workers Defense Committee to challenge the Polish Communist Party came after his involvement in protests against the 'oafish censors' who banned the performance of Dziady in the National Theatre in 1968 because of its anti-Russian slant, with it's view of the Empire as one huge prison frozen in tyranny and built upon the bones of innumerable dead.

In Mickiewicz's work a universal war of liberation was the only way in which the Tsarist despot who erected vain monuments like that of Peter the Great on his horse who is like a waterfall frozen solid and whose reign will melt under the warm western winds that shall unleash an almighty flood ( as the invasion of Iraq did but in in floods of blood).

Likewise the neoconservative ideologues who advocated the Iraq War back in 2003 similarly thought that by destroying Saddam's Babylonian tyranny, this would trigger of simultaneous liberation struggles in neighbouring Syria and Iran as people there saw that freedom was possible.

The fantastical idea that the collapse of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe was remotely comparable to the complex situation in the Middle East, or that the USA was acting as a force to destroy imperialism instead of reflecting an imperial war for geopolitical advantage and a secure oil supply, shows how much dissidents like Michnik had entirely lost the plot by 2003.

Biblography

John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism.
John Gray, Black Mass :Apocalyptic Politics and the Death of Utopia.
Mark Almond, Uprising.
Mark Almond, Who's Revolting Now.
Mark Almond, The Price of People Power
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity : Anger and Politics in Post Communist Europe
Czeslaw Milosz, A History of Polish Literature

The Return of Eastern Europe Watch and Where I Stand

This blog is back and coming up will be a demolition of the propaganda-cum-history served up by those like Edward Lucas and his The New Cold War. There is a growing need for real conservatives, social democrats and political liberals to oppose the increasingly insane policy of expanding NATO deep into the heart of Eurasia.

Also important is to stress the conservation of oil and gas and Green issues which have been neglected by militant progressives who believe the world is converging towards a World Order under the USA. This is a dangerous myth as is the Great Game being played out in a rerun not of the New Cold War but in a return to the terrain of pre-1914 geopolitics.

For a few month I have thrown myself into conservation which can be seen in the blog Krakow's New Dragon's which documents the new psychopathology of a rapacious neoliberal model of globalisation where national and local governments are subordinated to the needs wholly of global corporations and not the citizenry of Krakow, especially with land use and property development.

Those who have followed this blog will see the general world process in action at the microcosmic level of Krakow, as documented in the sister blog Krakow's New Dragons, and the crony capitalism that the much trumped "Open Society" was meant to prevent. Instead, though only bands of unrepentant Communists ignorant of Poland's history could pine for the People's Republic, Krakow is controlled by neoliberal corporatism.

This is destroying the city and has its roots in the successor ideology to Communism in another Utopian ideology where abstract doctrines and fundamentalism of the "free market" is, in fact, a rigged one wrecking the city's beauty and architectural legacy as well as creating a Rada Miejska that genuflects before global money power rather than local people and a real civil society.