Great article!

Haha! Grodzinski for President!

Good stuff

have any of you read Norman Davies History of Poland, the one he calls 'God's Playground'?

Utterly fascinating country. Unbelievable people.

"Orwell lives in Poland"??

Perhaps, but the lead-in to the story suggests a different take on it than Grabowski makes :

"Empires fueled, as always, by fear of enemies, real or imagined."

The various Eastern European countries, Poland included, have forever been the pawns sacrificed or won as the armies of larger Empires have swept back and forth across them, including various periods of foreign occupation. The bloodshed they have experienced in the process beggars the imagination.

Add to that the unending internal intrigue as powerful outside interests such as the US, Russia, and the EEU today seek to advance their own political and economic goals with no regard for the long-term interests of these buffer states.

I am shamed as our Western nations readily exploit latent political, racial, ethnic and religious dfferences - fanning them into overt hatreds - as they play their geopolitical games.

Orwell had the insight to recognise and describe a process that had been around long before he came upon the scene. We, with the help of mass media, have only improved upon those techniques.

I would suggest, then, that if the Poles exhibit an Orwellian bent, their cynicism, born of long experence, makes them more likely to cope with it than ourselves. Proof of that can be seen with our flag-waving Southern neighbours and our dog-like following in their footsteps.

Nothing schizophrenic in speaking out loud against Cold War II

Zalm: Thanks for your comments. I am afraid you missed the point, though. I don’t think Poles are more or less schizophrenic than other Europeans. What’s schizophrenic or perhaps just Orwellian, is that these smaller nations in Central and Eastern Europe have always had to put up with the imperial hubris.

As for being the poor man of Europe, I don’t think it is true at all. You may like to check on the recent economic situation of Iceland, Hungary and several other European countries.

As for the equality of opportunities, I think Poles are doing pretty well in that department. Particularly, when taking the recent American statistics as a benchmark.

All in all, I met in Slupsk quite normal folks by any definition. Nothing schizophrenic in marrying a member of an enemy nation, like Grudzien did. Nothing wrong with preserving the true history as Pencarski does. And nothing unhealthy with seeing through the imperial propaganda, like Grodzinski under the bridge or Chrulska at the Cafe.

Christopher

Zalm

I’ve read some other threads and I think that you deserve something better than my response directly above. Perhaps our differences were exaggerated unnecessarily by the choice of aggressive titles for the article and for your comment.

Empires, as a concept, are natural enemies of regions like Pomerania, where people are bound by birth, dialect, local culture and common experience, without excessive nationalism. Regionalism is opposite to homogeneity and makes populations less predictable and less controllable. Empires prefer homogeneity.

On the surface, empires versus regions, does not look like an even match. But in evolutionary perspective, think about dinosaurs versus mammals, regions and local communities stand a good chance due to their greater adaptability. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, are slow to evolve and sometimes actually devolve to some extend.

In the past, Mongolian hordes, for instance, seemed to have some principles against killing children, which recently, sadly, have been abandoned in favour of “precision” bombing. Empires are primeval beasts, of sorts, that have a doctrine instead of a brain.

Regions and communities, people, find astonishing ways to regenerate themselves as soon as the bombing stops and the imperial attention moves to some other spot. In the middle of nowhere in central Cambodia, I stopped two men on a moped, to ask for directions by way of showing them a small card somebody had written for me. The man in the front seat, King Sihanouk’s supporter, held the handlebar. He had no legs. He had walked into some minefield. The man in the back seat, former Khmer Rouge, operated the pedals. He had no hands. He had an accident planting a minefield.

Humanity is facing most serious challenges. The end result is by no means certain. In this struggle, I pin my hopes on the mammals, allegorically speaking. And these would be the small regions like Pomerania. And on a more basic level: an old farmer in a village of Lupawa, a young bartender in Slupsk and two amputees on a moped in Cambodia. To name just four.

Let's talk titles

Zalm and ME2, I regret that the title of the piece, which is mine, didn't convey to you what I had intended. But it gives us a good chance to talk about what goes on in one's mind when faced with the challenge of fashioning a headline for a wonderful piece such as this.

By saying Orwell 'lives' in Poland I didn't mean to imply that a direct analogy for his fictional world IS Poland.

Rather, I meant that Orwell himself, though dead, 'lives' in Poland through the clarity of the perceptions of the people Chris encountered. Caught between two powerful empires producing propaganda to justify their dangerous strategies, the Poles Chris encountered reflected Orwell's clear-eyed discernment of the lies and their own vulnerability to empires' ambitions.

Orwell 'lives' as well in the presence of his quoted material in the museum Chris visits. The Poles are mindful of Orwell. His views live on.

Headlines are like haikus -- when not attempting to be explicit, they are a gesture meant to ready the mind for what follows.

Chris's original headline was 'Traveling with Orwell in Poland'. Perhaps that would have been better, in retrospect.

Cheers, and thanks for the thoughtful engagement with this Tyee offering.

Haikus....

Loved the comment:
"Headlines are like haikus".

Never thought about a headline like that before and it makes perfect sense- a "gesture".
Thanks David.

Whups

I guess I have to pay more attention every day. I don't mean to call attention to my posts by my absence.

David, you're right - I didn't understand the headline, but as with so many things, that's my fault, not any one else's. I'm not that well-read, so when the message didn't fit into my recollections of 1984 or Animal Farm, I passed on by. Kris gave a great slice of life about one issue recently arisen in Poland and the thoughts of the people that wrestle with it. Much appreciated. It gave me a lot of food for thought as I attempted to fit it into what I'd learned of the Poles during my ten days there in 2005.

Nonetheless, I tried to impart a few things I learned about the Poles during my stay there in Barcice, Sztum, Malbork & Elblag that might impact on what I saw as the 'ambivalence' in the Poles that Kris wrote about. I tried to do it, as I often do, from the perspective of more than a hundred (and sometimes up to a thousand) years of history - something I am not accustomed to doing at home, but since I began travelling so much in the past couple of decades, I see the lessons of history all around me. In nearly every other place in the world, it's almost impossible not to do.

And despite a great amount of hospitality, almost Slavic in its effusiveness, I sensed a disappointment in the way the world has turned out for Poland. But my inquiries into it were stonewalled. Nobody was willing to talk about what they expected would be different, except in the grossest way, and nobody would identify what stopped Poland from achieving the greatness that was its potential for more than three hundred years. And after a while, I put two and two together - in most cases, the people I spoke to didn't answer because they didn't know.

Few Poles in the area of old Prussia have grown up in their traditional villages. Most live other than where their grandparents were born, and they have as little connection to them as you'd expect. None of the Poles in the Barcice region I met knew that most of the lowland farms behind the drained dykes were originally Swedish Lutherans who had been there since the Thirty Years' war, or Mennonites who fled persecution but were never permitted to join their confreres in Gdansk either, and so continued up the Vistula from the late 1600s to the early 1900s. None knew about the Jehovah's Witnesses who arrived in the 1870s or the small colony of Hugenots who reached Poland when it was a welcoming society to religious dissidents in the 16-1700s.

(cont'd)

And...

Their gravesites don't exist any longer, but for those who have institutional or religious memory, their stories live on. My in-laws help preserve that memory together with one family of good Polish friends who live in the district. Doubtless others do as well, but when you ask locals about it, they know nothing. But they can tell you how nice Lodz or Katowice or Lublin was....

...And that should tell you something about the lack of historical memory in a district, a province or a nation. Poland is not the only place I've experienced that - it's present to a great extent in the Balkans and Hungary too, in which I have travelled a bit in recent years.

I firmly support Poles in making the right decision about a nuclear umbrella, and Kris's article goes a long way toward demonstrating that Poles recognize the bankruptcy of all the arguments for the umbrella. But I wanted to point out that the people who are making those decisions have few resources to go on - the economic ties bind them to powers and superpowers around them for their daily bread; their political aims, which lie in keeping their heads down and not rocking the boat; there is simply no historical memory to rely upon and pass down when confronting "new" situations like this.

I pity Poland for this. And that's why I see them at the effect of decisions made elsewhere at their expense for at least the next twenty years.

I'm not a good writer nor did I have the benefit of sufficient reflection before I commented, so perhaps my comment came across as harsh. It was not intended to be thus. I'm sympathetic. But they're really in a pickle.

PS

I think Marian Grodzinski spoke closest to the truth. How drunk was he?

Zalm

I would say Grodzinski had a beer or two. He wasn’t drunk. I think his choice of words expressed lack of concern for social norms that only homeless and millionaires are able to display so naturally.

Zalm

Did you look at his picture in the gallery?