1 00:00:04,170 --> 00:00:13,290 Good evening, everybody. I have a great pleasure to welcome you at the second annual Kolakowski Lecture, which is our flagship, 2 00:00:13,290 --> 00:00:20,490 which is the flagship of our program on mother Polish studies here at San Antonio at San Antonio's College. 3 00:00:21,630 --> 00:00:30,360 And before I introduce today's speaker, Professor John Connolly from University of Berkeley, 4 00:00:30,540 --> 00:00:43,320 I felt that the subject of of of the of today's lecture, which is essentially nationalism, begs for some introduction in our contemporary context. 5 00:00:44,520 --> 00:00:53,000 As some of you may know, the word or the adjective National makes a great comeback in Warsaw. 6 00:00:53,040 --> 00:00:58,530 These days, we have no longer public mass media, but we have national mass media. 7 00:00:59,070 --> 00:01:04,090 And there was an institute for Maternity Medical magazine in Warsaw. 8 00:01:04,110 --> 00:01:08,250 This time it's actually called the National Institute for Procreation. 9 00:01:09,270 --> 00:01:16,500 So we have essentially the entire explosion of all these objectives in the public sphere, 10 00:01:16,900 --> 00:01:24,510 referring essentially to national or supreme, let's say simply let's say, let's say nationalities. 11 00:01:24,510 --> 00:01:35,639 When is this really the case? Actually, that after all these years, since 1989, nationalism is raising its head in Poland, 12 00:01:35,640 --> 00:01:44,610 or perhaps as some observers from Western Mass media see it this way we have essentially creeping authoritarianism. 13 00:01:44,820 --> 00:01:50,340 I really don't know about this, but the person who definitely knows more about this is today. 14 00:01:50,340 --> 00:01:56,670 Speaker at this is exactly professor Professor John Connolly from the University of California, Berkeley, 15 00:01:57,180 --> 00:02:08,010 who is one of the leading experts on the history of the official states theory of National Peace in Central Europe. 16 00:02:08,430 --> 00:02:16,169 And. Klein, in a recent piece in U.S. History of our heart and essentially that story of central 17 00:02:16,170 --> 00:02:22,600 Europe really dealing with not only the countries located in Russia and Germany, 18 00:02:22,600 --> 00:02:32,430 only about one in Germany itself. John is the author of two monographs of The Captive Universe, 19 00:02:32,630 --> 00:02:43,620 which was published by North Carolina Press and which was seen to be a prize from American History Association and from enemies, 20 00:02:43,710 --> 00:02:53,130 rather, the revolution in Catholic teaching of the Jews, which was published by Harvard in 2012. 21 00:02:53,130 --> 00:03:04,410 And this book, when again was awarded as a prize, which is the drama and camera issue prize and in the presence of his writing. 22 00:03:05,940 --> 00:03:11,270 Another book is three of these Central European modern age. 23 00:03:11,620 --> 00:03:21,029 He's going to talk about contemporary foreign affairs. And again, I very much hope that this is going to be a splendid lecture. 24 00:03:21,030 --> 00:03:28,170 Thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Please warm welcome to your home. 25 00:03:41,500 --> 00:03:46,690 Can you all hear me? Yes. Well, thank you very much for that kind introduction. 26 00:03:48,010 --> 00:03:53,500 I'd also like to thank St Anthonys for the honour of being asked to give this year's Kolakowski lecture. 27 00:03:53,860 --> 00:03:58,690 If I had a higher honour in my academic life, I don't know what it's been. 28 00:03:59,650 --> 00:04:06,550 And special thanks to Mikko. I couldn't ski and Agnieszka could been of St Anthony's program in Polish studies. 29 00:04:06,970 --> 00:04:10,060 For all they've done to make this visit both possible and enjoyable. 30 00:04:11,530 --> 00:04:18,370 So this evening I'd like to look pretty closely at Polish nationalism on the background of Poland's historical context. 31 00:04:18,730 --> 00:04:25,840 That's the context of East Central Europe. I wanted to try to shed some light on problems old and new of the region, but also of Poland. 32 00:04:26,590 --> 00:04:30,610 What can we learn about Poland by investigating its past and comparative context? 33 00:04:31,090 --> 00:04:38,260 What might we discover about Poland's current dilemma, which in popular media is often associated with irrational and extreme nationalism? 34 00:04:38,260 --> 00:04:46,330 If we look at the Polish case. Among other cases, claims are often made about the supposed intensity of nationalism in Eastern Europe. 35 00:04:46,360 --> 00:04:51,010 Just last week, I had a discussion with graduate students in Berkeley about European nationalism, 36 00:04:51,490 --> 00:04:55,209 and when asked if they could be precise about exactly where the problem of nationalism lay, 37 00:04:55,210 --> 00:04:59,230 all of them said without hesitation, that it lies somewhere in Eastern Europe. 38 00:05:00,040 --> 00:05:01,380 I don't know exactly what they were thinking of. 39 00:05:01,390 --> 00:05:08,740 Maybe they had read Christopher Clark's book on the outbreak of World War One, which associates that war's outbreak largely with Serbia. 40 00:05:08,800 --> 00:05:13,420 Maybe they were thinking of Bosnia. But where does Poland fit into this picture? 41 00:05:15,160 --> 00:05:23,880 Let me first make a clarifying remark. I call the region East Central Europe, but sometimes also just Eastern Europe as a kind of shorthand. 42 00:05:23,890 --> 00:05:30,880 But what I mean is a former Soviet bloc, but the former Soviet bloc is much more than a Cold War construct. 43 00:05:31,360 --> 00:05:35,920 The question of what unites East Central Europe calls to mind an anecdote from the war years, 44 00:05:36,370 --> 00:05:41,140 when several Polish communists urged Stalin to make Poland part of the USSR. 45 00:05:41,680 --> 00:05:49,060 Stalin was well studied in history, and he said that making Poland communist would be like trying to put a saddle on a cow. 46 00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:52,870 But what Stalin said is true. I think of Eastern Europe as a whole. 47 00:05:53,260 --> 00:05:59,140 The countries between historic Germany and Russia are countries where people buckle and shake at the prospect of foreign rule. 48 00:05:59,890 --> 00:06:04,150 It's a place that for centuries, regiments have treated it as their zone of interest, 49 00:06:04,150 --> 00:06:09,510 their own space, and which has therefore become a place that tends to reject imperialism. 50 00:06:09,520 --> 00:06:15,220 I think you might say Eastern Europe, Eastern Europeans are anti-imperial peoples, 51 00:06:16,750 --> 00:06:23,140 but they've also been somewhat complicit in their faith because rather than stand together, East Europeans have often quarrelled among themselves. 52 00:06:23,740 --> 00:06:32,080 For example, the Habsburgs could never have put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1849 without the help of Croats, Serbs, Romanians and Saxons. 53 00:06:32,080 --> 00:06:36,550 Germans. Hungarians, of course, did find an ally in Polish general Youssouf Bem, 54 00:06:37,090 --> 00:06:44,409 who assembled two Polish brigades and commanded a Hungarian army that predictably that army BAMS army operated in areas 55 00:06:44,410 --> 00:06:51,060 of Transylvania where they were seen not as liberators but as oppressors because the population was German and Romania, 56 00:06:52,210 --> 00:06:57,250 a more united East Central Europe in the 1930s, might have stood more firmly against, more firmly against Hitler. 57 00:06:58,240 --> 00:07:05,500 And what follows? I want to take the story of Polish nationalism from distant, approximate through nine episodes beginning very early. 58 00:07:06,640 --> 00:07:14,590 My first episode and my first episode, I want to trace the general question of why nationalism has been such a problem in East Central Europe. 59 00:07:14,950 --> 00:07:20,710 And respond to this question and here's a map to ask to to encourage you to think about it. 60 00:07:21,910 --> 00:07:25,030 To respond to this question, I want to take us deep into the pre national age, 61 00:07:25,450 --> 00:07:34,360 to the years following the decline of the Roman Empire, when Germanic Slavic and finally Magyar tribes entered East Central Europe. 62 00:07:35,440 --> 00:07:39,370 These tribes respected no national boundaries because no national boundaries existed. 63 00:07:39,910 --> 00:07:43,480 But more importantly, they had no idea of national belonging. 64 00:07:44,290 --> 00:07:47,619 Therefore, they intermingled, not realising that roughly a millennium. 65 00:07:47,620 --> 00:07:50,050 Later in the late 1700s, 66 00:07:50,440 --> 00:07:57,970 the German philosopher Johann Gottfried herder would proclaim that a language made a nation and that each nation had a mission before God. 67 00:07:58,810 --> 00:08:00,460 That a generation or two after that, 68 00:08:01,090 --> 00:08:09,010 leading intellectuals in East Central Europe would preach that to live under the rule of another nation was literal slavery, and that in 1918, 69 00:08:09,730 --> 00:08:15,309 an American president would pronounce an ideology of national self-determination so that each national movement in 70 00:08:15,310 --> 00:08:22,150 Eastern Europe could claim that it absolutely required a national state and fund and found that claim justified. 71 00:08:23,980 --> 00:08:33,100 All that was far in the unimaginable future. By the 10th century, after an initial settlement, chieftains emerged with the coming of Christianity. 72 00:08:33,460 --> 00:08:44,600 These chieftains were called kings. We think what became the Polish lands, the tribe of the Poland's gained the pre-eminent position. 73 00:08:44,930 --> 00:08:47,060 And here is elsewhere. A medieval state emerged. 74 00:08:47,390 --> 00:08:55,090 Though its boundaries shifted according to the fortunes of the dynasty from this period about the 10th century, 75 00:08:55,100 --> 00:08:59,510 there were also Hungarian, Croat, Serb and Bulgarian entities. 76 00:09:00,590 --> 00:09:07,490 I used the word settlement, but really nothing was settled. Poland might have been quite different, including bohemian Slovakia, 77 00:09:08,300 --> 00:09:13,340 if both Slav pro-British descendants had been able to hold this round this round together. 78 00:09:14,270 --> 00:09:20,960 Prague might now be a provincial city in western Poland and Czech, a west Polish dialect. 79 00:09:21,920 --> 00:09:26,030 The point is that there is nothing necessarily an eternal about Poland. 80 00:09:27,500 --> 00:09:35,480 Over the centuries, the region became even more mixed as German and later Jewish settlers moved eastward. 81 00:09:36,320 --> 00:09:39,650 Further south and east, other ethnic groups became increasingly entangled. 82 00:09:40,190 --> 00:09:45,710 But then the region came to share the joint experience mentioned above of becoming the possession of imperial states. 83 00:09:46,580 --> 00:09:49,730 This set it apart from the West, but also from Russia. 84 00:09:50,240 --> 00:09:57,200 If in those places, nation states grew and nationalised their populations over many centuries in East Central Europe, 85 00:09:57,920 --> 00:10:05,510 foreign imperial powers occupied the space. And much later, after the 1780s, it was national movements that made nations. 86 00:10:06,380 --> 00:10:13,970 Most famously, in Bohemia, in the Southeast, the region fell under Ottoman. 87 00:10:15,260 --> 00:10:18,410 In the centre, Hapsburg. And to the east. Muscovite rule. 88 00:10:19,250 --> 00:10:25,610 The Imperial States made the region even more complex by leaving differing legal and political traditions. 89 00:10:26,780 --> 00:10:36,109 They also helped make it more religiously complex. Many South Slavs over the centuries converted to Islam and tens of thousands of Serbs left 90 00:10:36,110 --> 00:10:41,060 Ottoman dominated territory and settled in Hapsburg border areas and the so-called Crimea, 91 00:10:41,690 --> 00:10:44,810 where they received land in return for military service. 92 00:10:45,890 --> 00:10:52,880 And so Christian Bosnia became partly Muslim and Catholic, Croatia became partly Serb Orthodox. 93 00:10:54,020 --> 00:10:57,079 Poland maintained independence longer than any place safe. 94 00:10:57,080 --> 00:11:06,020 Montenegro, but by 1795, also succumbed to the regional pattern when it was wiped from the map and partitioned by its neighbours. 95 00:11:07,220 --> 00:11:15,650 Thus, by the end of the 18th century, the political map had become much simpler, belying linguistic and religious complexity that lay underneath. 96 00:11:16,550 --> 00:11:21,560 But within a generation, a challenge emerged the challenge of ethnic nationalism propagated by national 97 00:11:21,560 --> 00:11:26,420 movements led by people like the brilliant Czech journalist Karl Havlicek. 98 00:11:26,750 --> 00:11:30,409 Borowski Karl Havlicek. 99 00:11:30,410 --> 00:11:37,790 Borowski wrote in April 1848, Whatever your speech, your nationality does not dominate, no panacea. 100 00:11:38,330 --> 00:11:40,640 You are oppressed even in the freest of countries. 101 00:11:41,300 --> 00:11:46,850 He quoted a lot of Czech speakers to that of black slaves in the United States of what used to Negroes, 102 00:11:46,850 --> 00:11:52,550 he asked, is even the most liberal administration? So what is special about Eastern Europe? 103 00:11:53,330 --> 00:11:59,810 What may differentiate it from other places is not the strength or the existence of national nationalist sentiment, 104 00:12:00,200 --> 00:12:09,830 but the clash between ideas such as these espoused by Havlicek and those of well-meaning liberal statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, 105 00:12:10,340 --> 00:12:14,570 who believed that each nation should govern itself within well-defined boundaries. 106 00:12:15,440 --> 00:12:18,470 On the background of the history of intermixing that I've just described. 107 00:12:18,920 --> 00:12:25,550 Such borders were impossible to draw. There was no way to create nation states in East Central Europe. 108 00:12:27,200 --> 00:12:30,590 Second episode Let's remain for a moment in the late 18th century. 109 00:12:31,640 --> 00:12:36,620 What is distinctive about Poland is that the very time the idea of ethnic nationalism 110 00:12:36,620 --> 00:12:41,720 was growing among other peoples was also the time when Poland ceased to be a state. 111 00:12:42,440 --> 00:12:48,649 Poland disappeared as a political as an independent political entity many centuries later than other East European states, 112 00:12:48,650 --> 00:12:54,350 for example, Bulgaria or Hungary or Serbia, all of which were gone by the 15th century. 113 00:12:55,430 --> 00:13:03,800 But after Poland lost statehood in 1795, the elite, the Polish gentry, remained as an intact social class. 114 00:13:04,310 --> 00:13:12,590 And it was remarkable in two senses. First, it was much larger than counterparts elsewhere, comprising about 25% of the population of central Poland. 115 00:13:13,040 --> 00:13:17,720 This meant that far more people identified as nationals in Poland than any other place in East Central Europe, 116 00:13:18,260 --> 00:13:23,630 with one possible exception that of Serbia. And I'll have much more to say about Serbia later on. 117 00:13:24,740 --> 00:13:29,210 In 1800, an estimated 1 million Polish speakers thought of themselves as Polish nationals. 118 00:13:29,690 --> 00:13:32,089 The number of Czechs, Slovaks or Slovenes, 119 00:13:32,090 --> 00:13:38,810 the thought of themselves in national terms at that point could have been counted in the thousands, if not many, in Hungary or Croatia. 120 00:13:39,360 --> 00:13:42,000 The nationally conscious elites were much smaller than in Poland. 121 00:13:42,870 --> 00:13:49,980 But now, from the late 18th century, national consciousness began to grow, beginning with Hungary and Bohemia. 122 00:13:50,610 --> 00:13:56,280 And we know precisely who was responsible. Joseph, the second of Austria. 123 00:13:57,570 --> 00:14:04,950 In March 1784, the Hapsburg ruler issued a mandate that German be used as the language of administration throughout his lands. 124 00:14:05,700 --> 00:14:10,980 This set off a furious response in Hungary, but not because of any challenge to the Hungarian language. 125 00:14:11,550 --> 00:14:17,340 Joseph did not care about Hungarian at that point. This was a dying language hardly used by the educated classes. 126 00:14:17,850 --> 00:14:25,980 Rather the language Joseph wanted to do away with, and to which the Hungarian gentry felt an emotional attachment was Latin. 127 00:14:27,870 --> 00:14:32,670 Joseph considered Latin to be an impediment to modern state formation because it was a dead language. 128 00:14:33,690 --> 00:14:36,629 The elites in Hungary had grown attached to Latin because it permitted them to 129 00:14:36,630 --> 00:14:41,910 communicate in a hugely diverse region where people spoke Hungarian but also Romanian, 130 00:14:41,910 --> 00:14:44,550 Slovak, Croatian, Serb and German. 131 00:14:45,540 --> 00:14:52,980 But Joseph was not a nationalist for whom German was a default option as the modern language spoken by the most people in Hungary. 132 00:14:53,550 --> 00:15:01,530 Yet by mandating its use, Joseph ignited fear among the Magyar elite that they would simply become another group of German speaking nobles. 133 00:15:02,250 --> 00:15:10,050 In 1790, shortly before dying. Joseph revoked this ordinance because the opposition it provoked in Hungary was endangering the security of his realm. 134 00:15:10,650 --> 00:15:17,670 But by now, by 1790, the fire of modern nationalism was burning brightly among Magyar nobles. 135 00:15:18,300 --> 00:15:28,110 From the 1790s, a small group of talented intellectuals led by philologist and translator Florence cousin, she modernised the Hungarian language, 136 00:15:28,500 --> 00:15:36,510 and over the succeeding decades, the Hungarian elite ensured that Hungarian displaced Latin as well as German schools and administration. 137 00:15:37,320 --> 00:15:45,910 This, in turn, unleashed national movements among Romanians, Slovaks, Croats and serves as Magyars did not want to be Germans. 138 00:15:45,930 --> 00:15:49,740 None of them wanted to be Magyars in a slightly different manner. 139 00:15:49,770 --> 00:15:53,280 Joseph's Reform helped launch a national movement in Bohemia in the Czech lands 140 00:15:53,910 --> 00:15:58,020 or a small group of patriots brought the Czech language back from extinction. 141 00:15:58,890 --> 00:16:05,430 The ideological force everywhere was Johann Gottfried Hadar for Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs. 142 00:16:05,850 --> 00:16:10,590 By giving them a sense of mission that each nation had a destiny before God. 143 00:16:11,340 --> 00:16:19,650 But for Hungarians, by predicting that Hungarians would disappear, submerged in a sea of Slavs and lose any destiny they might have. 144 00:16:21,450 --> 00:16:30,029 My third episode takes us into the early 19th century. Poland came to modern nationalism on a very different path with different timing 145 00:16:30,030 --> 00:16:34,050 and a different combination of concerns and actions on the part of its patriots. 146 00:16:34,770 --> 00:16:41,610 Polish patriots of the early 19th century were not as concerned about culture and language as counterparts elsewhere. 147 00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:48,600 In fact, in the 1820s, the poet Adam Miscavige even remarked that the Czechs seemed obsessed with language. 148 00:16:49,080 --> 00:16:52,200 He thought that was very strange. Strange thing for a poet to think. 149 00:16:52,980 --> 00:16:56,340 Instead, Polish patriots were concerned about rights. 150 00:16:57,210 --> 00:17:00,540 Unlike other East Europeans, they had just lost a stake they considered their own. 151 00:17:01,560 --> 00:17:07,470 At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Poles got the pseudo consolation of the kingdom. 152 00:17:08,280 --> 00:17:13,920 Their King Alexander, the first of Russia, promised to uphold Polish rights. 153 00:17:14,730 --> 00:17:20,370 Yet in the 1820s, Poles increasingly complained of illegal behaviour and abuses by Russian officials. 154 00:17:20,880 --> 00:17:24,600 They complained of censorship, of the crushing of institutions, of self-rule, 155 00:17:24,600 --> 00:17:29,070 of arrests and deportations, of poles, for even recalling Polish independence. 156 00:17:29,910 --> 00:17:36,810 A group of students from Vilna, for example, was punished, some sent to Siberia when one of their number chalked on a wall. 157 00:17:37,260 --> 00:17:40,500 Long live the Constitution of 1791. 158 00:17:41,220 --> 00:17:49,860 This constitution, the 17 9091 constitution was an instrument that might have formed the basis for the transition of Poland to a modern, 159 00:17:50,250 --> 00:17:53,610 liberal democracy. This progress was stopped by the partitions. 160 00:17:55,310 --> 00:18:01,940 It was in defiance of evident injustice that Polish cadets launched an uprising against Russian rule in November 1830. 161 00:18:02,570 --> 00:18:07,730 The consequences were disastrous. Whatever liberties Poles possessed were now reduced. 162 00:18:08,360 --> 00:18:14,060 Many of Poland's leading writers and scholars, including Muscovites I'm sorry, Moskovitz, but also Frederic Chopin, 163 00:18:14,510 --> 00:18:22,170 never left Poland and founded the great so-called Great Emigration in Paris, which numbered about 10,000 people from now. 164 00:18:22,190 --> 00:18:26,330 Poland was as much in their ideas, poems and music as it was on Polish soil, 165 00:18:26,900 --> 00:18:34,160 where after a second uprising, the second failed uprising in 1863, even the word Poland disappeared. 166 00:18:36,520 --> 00:18:41,740 Still throughout the 19th century, the cause of Polish nationalism in the partitioned lands remains simple. 167 00:18:42,640 --> 00:18:50,710 As the historian Stefan Canaris wrote, nationally conscious poles were those who could not accept the loss of Polish sovereignty. 168 00:18:51,010 --> 00:18:56,800 They demonstrated their nationalist attitude simply by maintaining linguistic and cultural distinctiveness. 169 00:18:57,430 --> 00:19:05,800 And one could say that as political freedoms shrank, Polish nationalism also became, as it was elsewhere, largely a cultural cause. 170 00:19:07,390 --> 00:19:12,580 But as the century went by, even that even the cultural cause became increasingly difficult. 171 00:19:13,090 --> 00:19:26,200 And again, we see something that is unusual in Poland. Elsewhere in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech lands. 172 00:19:26,860 --> 00:19:31,960 As the century progressed, so did opportunities to build national schooling, culture and administration. 173 00:19:32,140 --> 00:19:37,810 So here you see a map of historic Hungary, which was essentially independent after 1867, 174 00:19:38,140 --> 00:19:41,350 permitting the Hungarian elites to do as they liked on that territory. 175 00:19:43,300 --> 00:19:51,730 Here, a map of the situation after 1878, in which you can see an independent Romanian, Bulgarian Serb state as well as Greek state. 176 00:19:52,750 --> 00:19:56,980 All of these entities could do what nation states were supposed to do. 177 00:19:58,060 --> 00:20:06,490 I think there's one more. Yes. And you see the gradual growth of Serbia over the course of the 19th century in most of Poland. 178 00:20:06,820 --> 00:20:13,060 Possibilities for promoting national schooling and culture, however, were reduced precisely as they were expanding elsewhere. 179 00:20:14,230 --> 00:20:24,370 In the late 19th century. In the German Russian lands poles were forced to conspire illegally in order to simply learn their language. 180 00:20:25,000 --> 00:20:33,280 So we see a very odd combination. Poles had a large class, the gentry and later the intelligentsia, with a very distinct idea of what Poland was. 181 00:20:33,280 --> 00:20:38,890 But at the same time, unparalleled energies were directed against making Poland ever re-emerge. 182 00:20:38,920 --> 00:20:46,270 Why? Perhaps because more than any other force, the idea of Poland disrupted the European order. 183 00:20:47,180 --> 00:20:50,799 Okay, well, maybe there was one other equally disruptive, disruptive force, 184 00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:56,350 and that was the greater Serbian idea represented by the growing Serb state. 185 00:20:57,160 --> 00:21:00,040 There are a number of similarities, I think, between Poland and Serbia. 186 00:21:00,190 --> 00:21:06,520 As in Poland, the national movement in Serbia attempted to form the nation not only through culture, but through armed insurrections. 187 00:21:06,550 --> 00:21:10,930 And then from the 79 is more or less the same time as in Poland. 188 00:21:11,770 --> 00:21:18,490 And like the Polish, the Serb cause was thought especially disruptive because Serbs lived in several states, all of which would lose if Serbia won. 189 00:21:19,510 --> 00:21:23,140 This is a fact at the foundation of World War One. 190 00:21:23,980 --> 00:21:30,760 Another thing that was similar was that very many Serbs had a sense of their national identity, yet not because they belonged to a gentry. 191 00:21:30,760 --> 00:21:33,190 The Serb gentry had been destroyed by the Ottomans. 192 00:21:34,060 --> 00:21:42,760 What Serbs had was a Serb Orthodox Church, but perhaps more importantly, they had poems about the undying virtues of heroes from their past, 193 00:21:42,760 --> 00:21:49,750 poems that were sung from generation to generation over hundreds of years, and told them that Ottoman rule was temporary. 194 00:21:50,380 --> 00:21:53,140 These poems, by the way, were not written down until the 19th century. 195 00:21:53,680 --> 00:22:02,440 This is the so-called Kosovo cycle, when you can see a singer with his counsellor in the late in the 19th century, very many Poles as well as Serbs, 196 00:22:02,440 --> 00:22:06,460 took for granted against all reason, 197 00:22:06,700 --> 00:22:15,430 evident reason of the time that foreign occupation would end because it was an offence to basic norms of decency and civilisation. 198 00:22:16,330 --> 00:22:24,460 By contrast, Hungarian, Croatian or Czech elites had become subjects of the Habsburgs legally and arguably voluntarily, 199 00:22:24,640 --> 00:22:27,670 and that tended to mitigate the demands raised by these elites. 200 00:22:28,390 --> 00:22:33,430 Historian historians have said that both Serbs and Poles needed heritage in the ideas of 201 00:22:33,430 --> 00:22:39,190 the German idealism less than other peoples to tell them first who they were and second, 202 00:22:39,460 --> 00:22:44,950 what role they had to play in history. Poles and Serbs knew who they were, and they knew what their task was. 203 00:22:44,950 --> 00:22:48,820 It was to recreate Serb and Polish sovereignty. 204 00:22:50,650 --> 00:22:57,520 Fourth episode There's something even more distinct and important and in some ways interesting about the Polish case. 205 00:22:58,390 --> 00:23:03,190 A basic question had to be answered after 1795. 206 00:23:03,280 --> 00:23:10,240 Who was responsible for Poland's woes? Poles found explanations not so much in Saint Petersburg or Vienna or Berlin. 207 00:23:10,390 --> 00:23:14,260 The evils of residing there were obvious. They found them instead. 208 00:23:14,260 --> 00:23:19,360 In Poland itself. Among Poles, Poland had disappeared because Poles had betrayed it. 209 00:23:20,680 --> 00:23:24,550 Infamous, in particular, was the target of each confederation. 210 00:23:25,000 --> 00:23:32,890 Polish magnates who rejected the Constitution of May 1791 and cooperated cooperated with Russia in dismembering Poland. 211 00:23:33,520 --> 00:23:38,380 Several conspirators, including the Bishop of Vilna, were captured in 1794, publicly hanged. 212 00:23:39,160 --> 00:23:47,319 So in a sense, Poles always had each other to blame for misfortune, as Poland's fortunes declined in the 19th century. 213 00:23:47,320 --> 00:23:52,510 The need for explanation and the search for the guilty in one's own camp intensified. 214 00:23:53,350 --> 00:24:01,030 Where, for example, the uprisings of 1830 and 1863 not foolhardy undertakings in the eyes of critics. 215 00:24:01,630 --> 00:24:05,440 Those launching the uprisings were not simply failed revolutionaries, but traitors. 216 00:24:06,670 --> 00:24:09,910 They had created the situation in which the Polish language faced extinction. 217 00:24:10,810 --> 00:24:19,690 Proponents of so-called organic work said that if one if one really wanted to serve Poland, one had to do practical things on its behalf. 218 00:24:20,230 --> 00:24:30,250 For example, in education and science or business, and in some form, cooperation with the partitioning power was unavoidable. 219 00:24:31,330 --> 00:24:38,890 When we look elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the blame for national calamity was placed on the shoulders of some non-national for Czechs or Hungarians. 220 00:24:39,250 --> 00:24:46,270 That was the German and South Slav areas. It was the Turk for Slovaks, Croats and Transylvanian Romanians. 221 00:24:46,270 --> 00:24:55,030 It was the Hungarian. Now to my fifth episode, I said above that Polish national ideas in the early 19th century tended to be political, 222 00:24:55,390 --> 00:25:01,270 aimed at the civic community of Polish nationals who had held and would hold rights in a Polish state. 223 00:25:02,260 --> 00:25:04,210 But in the late 19th century, that changed. 224 00:25:04,570 --> 00:25:14,370 Poland, in a sense, caught up in this rather nasty time of social Darwinism and what Karl Gorski called politics and a new key Polish elites, 225 00:25:14,380 --> 00:25:22,380 like all others in the region, saved the Hungarian who. Had their own state attempted to build a modern nation in the absence of state institutions. 226 00:25:23,310 --> 00:25:28,880 Yet Polish patriots faced one more unusual challenge because many of them were landowners. 227 00:25:28,890 --> 00:25:35,820 Most desperately poor. Polish speaking peasants view them as aliens, almost like an ethnically foreign group. 228 00:25:36,180 --> 00:25:40,230 Sometimes, in fact, they use the word pole to indicate members of the gentry. 229 00:25:41,160 --> 00:25:46,950 Elsewhere, the landowner or boss was often of a foreign nationality, for example, in the Czech lands. 230 00:25:47,190 --> 00:25:51,180 It was a German and the Czech movement built Czech identity as anti-German. 231 00:25:51,720 --> 00:26:00,060 In Bosnia, the landowner was Muslim. In Slovenia, Germany in 1800, not only Prague and Bruno, but also Budapest. 232 00:26:00,330 --> 00:26:03,600 Bratislava and Zagreb were German speaking cities. 233 00:26:04,350 --> 00:26:07,530 But by mid-century, that situation was rapidly changing. 234 00:26:07,800 --> 00:26:11,880 And for example, Prague by 1900 was largely a Czech speaking place. 235 00:26:12,660 --> 00:26:17,430 The German was an enemy against whom the self was clearly defined and who was then displaced. 236 00:26:17,880 --> 00:26:21,930 From culture. From business. From politics. From all traces in one's own language. 237 00:26:22,830 --> 00:26:28,620 In central Poland, however, not only the countryside, but also also the cities tended to be culturally Polish. 238 00:26:29,400 --> 00:26:35,640 So against whom? With a modern ethnic Polish nation, deformed, who lived in the midst of Poles, 239 00:26:36,000 --> 00:26:42,840 who might fulfil the function of convincing Polish peasants that they were the same nation has Polish townspeople and gentry. 240 00:26:43,410 --> 00:26:45,090 In my view, that other was the Jew. 241 00:26:46,050 --> 00:26:52,890 Where Poland stands out against neighbours was not in a growing antipathy toward Jews that was universal in East Central Europe. 242 00:26:53,580 --> 00:26:58,470 What was unusual was not even the sense that the Jew was in a similar bill like no other people. 243 00:26:59,220 --> 00:27:02,910 Here, the Christian world was clear about the Jews essential otherness. 244 00:27:03,420 --> 00:27:09,450 Jews would remain a separate and curse people to the end of time, according to the anti Judaic teachings of that period. 245 00:27:10,110 --> 00:27:16,680 What was unusual in Poland was that all of these dimensions the religious, the economic, cultural, professional and racial, 246 00:27:16,920 --> 00:27:20,489 could come together in a context where the number of Jews was huge and where 247 00:27:20,490 --> 00:27:25,530 they could be portrayed as an alien and once as an alien nation one's midst. 248 00:27:26,130 --> 00:27:34,350 There was no other national movement where opprobrium was focussed to the same degree on the Jew in order to fashion the national self. 249 00:27:36,630 --> 00:27:41,190 Sixth episode is Independence 1918. 250 00:27:42,780 --> 00:27:46,740 I'm sorry. One more business and one more, please. 251 00:27:47,760 --> 00:27:54,150 Thank you. If West Europe. Britain, for example, tends to mourn the dead of World War One. 252 00:27:54,810 --> 00:27:59,310 East Europe celebrates the war as having enabled independence. 253 00:28:00,390 --> 00:28:04,620 But historians also register the fact that everywhere with, with one exception, 254 00:28:05,460 --> 00:28:12,780 return to the independent republics, the democracies of 1918 soon became undemocratic and authoritarian. 255 00:28:13,740 --> 00:28:21,240 And historians describe this sad fact in part to the circumstance that these national states were, in fact, not national. 256 00:28:21,810 --> 00:28:27,810 Each new nation state was like a miniature Hapsburg empire with large ethnic minorities. 257 00:28:28,560 --> 00:28:32,340 In Poland, only about two thirds of the population were ethnic Poles. 258 00:28:33,090 --> 00:28:39,149 In 1926, Marshal Pilsudski put an end to Polish democracy because he feared that Poland had become ungovernable. 259 00:28:39,150 --> 00:28:45,210 Ungovernable in part because of the multiplicity of parties in Parliament, many of which were ethnic. 260 00:28:46,260 --> 00:28:52,650 Yet Czechoslovakia was even more ethnically complex, yet maintained itself as a democracy until 1938. 261 00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:57,629 The difference, in my view, lay not in stronger democratic traditions. 262 00:28:57,630 --> 00:29:00,720 Among the Czechs, the Poles also had strong democratic traditions. 263 00:29:01,110 --> 00:29:06,780 Rather, it lay in the fact that the Czech political elite was much more coherent than the Polish. 264 00:29:06,780 --> 00:29:11,580 This is, by the way, a fact that Margaret Macmillan alludes to in her book on 1919. 265 00:29:12,750 --> 00:29:19,380 Throughout the interwar years, five Czech parties from left to right, from Social Democrats through agrarian to the national Democrats, 266 00:29:19,890 --> 00:29:23,930 formed a coalition and always had a simple majority against the Germans. 267 00:29:23,940 --> 00:29:26,880 It was the so-called Patkar group of five parties. 268 00:29:28,320 --> 00:29:36,450 So they held a majority against Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Communists, who traditionally got about 10% in each election. 269 00:29:37,440 --> 00:29:44,669 Had it not been for the deep divide in Polish nationalism between the camps of Yousaf, Pilsudski and Rome and not Demovsky, 270 00:29:44,670 --> 00:29:49,170 Polish elites could also have numerically dominated the parliament and thus their state. 271 00:29:49,980 --> 00:29:56,730 I should note that in the interwar years, Croat, Serb and Hungarian elites were often much more cohesive than the Polish counterpart. 272 00:29:57,510 --> 00:30:03,420 So what was that? What was that divide in Polish nationalism about? Both Pilsudski and Demovsky were ardent nationalists. 273 00:30:04,140 --> 00:30:11,490 We read that one was left the other right. One more civic, one more at the other, more ethnic, one more jagiellonian, the other more pious. 274 00:30:12,480 --> 00:30:16,590 Yet neither was Democratic. Neither was democratic. 275 00:30:16,590 --> 00:30:24,060 But it was the more moderate Pilsudski who staged a coup against democracy in order to head off a possible dictatorship of the right. 276 00:30:25,170 --> 00:30:29,790 Yet having seized power, as Hendrik Burzynski wrote, Crack a great crack. 277 00:30:29,790 --> 00:30:34,470 A historian Pilsudski did nothing to moderate Poland's nationality problems. 278 00:30:35,610 --> 00:30:39,239 And though the differences between their followers were not great, 279 00:30:39,240 --> 00:30:46,350 the two camps accused each other not simply of poor political choices, but of being bad poles, being traitors. 280 00:30:47,670 --> 00:30:51,090 I think the extraordinary standard, by the way, for being a good pole, 281 00:30:51,780 --> 00:30:55,450 maybe the impossible standard of being a good pole were a legacy of the partition 282 00:30:55,450 --> 00:30:59,859 of time when every act undertaken for Poland seemed at the same time necessary, 283 00:30:59,860 --> 00:31:04,650 yet insufficient, and in the end became arguably counterproductive. 284 00:31:06,810 --> 00:31:13,760 Kosinski angrily broke off his last personal meeting with Demovsky in 1920. 285 00:31:14,550 --> 00:31:23,070 After Demovsky asked a simple question How can we go to Paris, to the peacemakers in Paris, and demand eastern Galicia and the eastern Cressy, 286 00:31:23,670 --> 00:31:30,570 and at the same time support the desires of Ukrainians for an independent Ukraine that will contain those precise territories? 287 00:31:31,050 --> 00:31:37,530 Perhaps what bothered national Democrats and Dexia under Demovsky about the Nazi Pilsudski 288 00:31:37,530 --> 00:31:42,870 camp was its failure to describe in straightforward language what it was actually doing, 289 00:31:43,500 --> 00:31:48,240 which was in fact not very different from what the national Democrats would have done. 290 00:31:49,140 --> 00:31:53,640 I realise it's a provocative argument, but I'll move on to episode six. 291 00:31:55,440 --> 00:32:00,510 Fascism 1930s was Poland fascist, and if not, why not? 292 00:32:02,490 --> 00:32:09,960 Though in the 1930s Pilsudski the military strongman was often compared to Mussolini's rule, in fact was not fascist. 293 00:32:10,410 --> 00:32:13,770 He had no great fascist movement. 294 00:32:14,700 --> 00:32:17,640 There was no movement from below supporting him of that sort. 295 00:32:18,240 --> 00:32:25,980 He possessed no cohesive ideology, no systematic racism or chauvinism, no program of aggression, no idea of a total state. 296 00:32:26,760 --> 00:32:30,210 Poland did produce a tiny fascist movement whose main constituency was students. 297 00:32:31,380 --> 00:32:35,330 And there's an excellent book on the subject by our own Nikolai. 298 00:32:35,890 --> 00:32:41,770 Kunitz ski, which traces the movement, in fact, through the entire 20th century and is a great study in Polish history. 299 00:32:43,630 --> 00:32:48,670 But there were other countries in the region, especially Romania and Hungary, that produced sizeable fascist parties. 300 00:32:49,780 --> 00:32:52,210 Why was Polish fascism small and weak? 301 00:32:53,200 --> 00:33:00,490 The Yale historian Pyotr Vantage wrote that fascism went against a long tradition of Polish ideals of freedom, individualism and toleration. 302 00:33:01,330 --> 00:33:06,459 And it seems that he's right to a sense, because if you read even Poland's right wing press of that period, 303 00:33:06,460 --> 00:33:13,980 you find, generally speaking, a rejection of totalitarianism as being incompatible with Polish political traditions. 304 00:33:14,500 --> 00:33:18,040 Those traditions going back to the 17th to the 18th century were undeniable. 305 00:33:19,270 --> 00:33:24,010 Totalitarianism was associated furthermore with Poland's national enemies, Germany and Russia. 306 00:33:25,180 --> 00:33:31,300 But the Nazi regime did nothing to stop the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in its own ranks. 307 00:33:32,170 --> 00:33:40,569 Pilsudski died in 1935, and his successors aped fascist models, much like counterparts elsewhere in Eastern Europe, by the way, for example, 308 00:33:40,570 --> 00:33:46,420 of strict discipline within a so-called within a pseudo fascist organisation called the Camp of National Unity, 309 00:33:46,780 --> 00:33:49,210 and by calling the head of the state the leader of the nation. 310 00:33:49,990 --> 00:33:55,990 But Poland settled into into a kind of political muddle in the late 1930s with two political camps centre, right and centre left. 311 00:33:56,560 --> 00:34:04,030 Neither, by any means homogeneous, moving closer to each other, but never reconciling after 1935. 312 00:34:05,170 --> 00:34:12,340 However, in the changed international situation of 1939, Polish politics rose decisively out of this muddle. 313 00:34:12,790 --> 00:34:16,990 More accurately, Polish society rose to become the first to say no to Hitler. 314 00:34:17,710 --> 00:34:21,670 The first society in the first stage anywhere to say no to Hitler. 315 00:34:22,090 --> 00:34:27,700 Poland may have seemed quasi fascist to some outsiders, but it was definitely anti-Nazi. 316 00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:35,320 So let's move now to episode seven, which is World War Two. Here's the typical sequence we have of the events leading to World War Two. 317 00:34:36,340 --> 00:34:39,940 Hitler occupies the Rhineland, and the West fails to protest. 318 00:34:40,600 --> 00:34:44,350 Hitler occupies Austria and the West watches passively. 319 00:34:44,830 --> 00:34:49,270 Hitler seizes the Sudetenland, and the West not only fails to protest, but gives his blessing. 320 00:34:49,900 --> 00:34:53,110 And then Hitler attacks Poland, and the West finally responds. 321 00:34:54,340 --> 00:34:59,590 The last act it was attack on Poland was, in fact, a bit more complicated, in fact. 322 00:35:00,070 --> 00:35:04,930 And by the way, Timothy Snyder in his recent book has an excellent description of this entire episode. 323 00:35:06,040 --> 00:35:10,540 Poland had a choice whether to be a Nazi ally or a Nazi target of attack. 324 00:35:11,470 --> 00:35:18,610 Late in 1938, after finishing up Czechoslovakia, the Nazi regime courted Poland for an Anti-bolshevik alliance. 325 00:35:19,240 --> 00:35:26,500 The main price required was Danzig Gdansk, a city that was a free city that Poland did not even possess. 326 00:35:26,500 --> 00:35:34,660 The Germans also asked for an extraterritorial highway through the so-called Polish corridor, linking the western areas of Germany with East Prussia. 327 00:35:35,830 --> 00:35:43,780 Note that every other East European state said yes to a Nazi offer of alliance saved Czechoslovakia, which was not courted. 328 00:35:44,260 --> 00:35:51,730 So why was Poland different? I think its obstinacy has to do with the absolute value Poles came to attach to sovereignty, 329 00:35:52,000 --> 00:36:00,160 a value that once again goes back to the late loss of statehood in 1795, even territory that Poland did not fully control. 330 00:36:00,940 --> 00:36:09,219 Danzig dance was not negotiable. There was, however, another case in Eastern Europe that was somewhat similar to Poland. 331 00:36:09,220 --> 00:36:15,130 It's not a state of that period, but it's a region. I'm thinking, Can you guess what I'm thinking of Serbia once again. 332 00:36:15,700 --> 00:36:24,850 In March 1941, a group of Air Force Serb Air Force officers in Belgrade staged a coup against the Regent Prince Paul, 333 00:36:25,750 --> 00:36:29,500 who had who had been in charge of the Yugoslav government since 1934. 334 00:36:30,280 --> 00:36:35,379 The coup was a protest against the pact that Prince Paul had just signed in Vienna with the Nazis, 335 00:36:35,380 --> 00:36:40,870 with the Nazi government, which in some senses would appear to an unbiased observer, 336 00:36:40,870 --> 00:36:49,190 perhaps as a very favourable act for Yugoslavia, because it didn't mandate Yugoslavia to do much of anything, 337 00:36:49,240 --> 00:36:57,250 didn't permit German troops to go through Yugoslav territory. All that it pledged was that Yugoslavia would not act aggressively toward Germany. 338 00:36:58,690 --> 00:37:03,070 Yet this simple signature on this document was enough to cause these Air Force 339 00:37:03,100 --> 00:37:08,770 officers to rise up and to be greeted as heroes throughout throughout Serbia. 340 00:37:09,400 --> 00:37:17,050 In a brief period in March 1941. So I think here too, we see in Serbia, as in Poland, 341 00:37:17,530 --> 00:37:24,800 that even slight challenges to sovereignty were considered to be absolutely unacceptable and in both cases for deep historical reasons. 342 00:37:25,390 --> 00:37:28,570 As you know, in both places, partisan armies emerged. 343 00:37:29,920 --> 00:37:34,810 In one sense, they were very similar in both places. The army over the home army was very inclusive. 344 00:37:39,180 --> 00:37:43,940 A very interesting case in the background of a preview of previous episodes of Polish history. 345 00:37:44,990 --> 00:37:47,700 But also Tito's partisans were very inclusive. 346 00:37:47,720 --> 00:37:54,290 I would say that perhaps they were the only bottom up anti nationalist movement in the history of East Central Europe. 347 00:37:54,740 --> 00:38:00,440 They were anti nationalist, anti genocidal. The difference between the partisans and the home army is also evident. 348 00:38:00,470 --> 00:38:09,380 Tito's units were single. They were communist. Poland's home army was non communist, even anti-communist. 349 00:38:10,370 --> 00:38:19,040 What is similar in the two cases after the war is that they posed the strongest challenge challenges to Stalin's rule in East Central Europe. 350 00:38:19,790 --> 00:38:22,250 Which brings us to episode eight Communism. 351 00:38:23,270 --> 00:38:31,160 I think within the Soviet bloc outside of Yugoslavia, one can see again that Poland played a very unusual role. 352 00:38:31,970 --> 00:38:36,740 It was perhaps the most anti-communist place in the region because nowhere else 353 00:38:36,740 --> 00:38:41,150 did Soviet style communism seem more out of tune with national traditions. 354 00:38:42,500 --> 00:38:45,980 And I get this from work by the late historian Christina kersten, 355 00:38:46,730 --> 00:38:56,959 who studied the underground press in 1945 and found it preaching such messages as Soviet power would imperil the soul of the nation. 356 00:38:56,960 --> 00:39:02,330 The Essence of Polish Mass. And we also read in the underground press of 1945 a very clear judgement. 357 00:39:02,330 --> 00:39:12,110 Those who supported a government set up by Poland's enemy was not was was not only not a good poll, he was not a poll at all. 358 00:39:13,160 --> 00:39:19,340 Still, as you know, millions of people who were undoubtedly Polish supported and indeed built Poland under communism. 359 00:39:19,520 --> 00:39:27,290 Millions joined the Communist Party. And even those Polish communists who cared, not at least about Poland as a nation. 360 00:39:28,430 --> 00:39:36,169 And Norman DAVIES actually describes very well in his volume two of God's playground, the great embarrassment felt by Polish Communists. 361 00:39:36,170 --> 00:39:44,809 Often, even those who cared little about Poland as a nation had no choice but to portray what they were doing at every stage, 362 00:39:44,810 --> 00:39:47,240 as in keeping with the interests of Poland. 363 00:39:47,810 --> 00:39:54,110 Otherwise, they knew they would occupy spaces in national memory that were associated with what type of visa. 364 00:39:55,700 --> 00:39:57,440 So at the height of Stalinism, 365 00:39:58,460 --> 00:40:04,340 the Polish regime was printing classics of Polish literature in the hundreds of thousands Polish literature and philosophy, 366 00:40:05,480 --> 00:40:14,000 and encouraging the loving, indeed demanding the loving rebuilding true to historical detail of destroyed cities, including their Catholic churches. 367 00:40:15,260 --> 00:40:23,210 The Polish Stalinist regime supported archaeological studies proving the supposedly ancient Polish ownership of Poland's Western territories, 368 00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:30,260 and while using a language that was more like Roman Demovsky than that of Rosa Luxemburg. 369 00:40:30,710 --> 00:40:35,810 It held back from a complete assault on private farms, the church and the universities. 370 00:40:37,370 --> 00:40:46,610 In the 1960s, Polish communists, nationals, even nationals, and even crossed the border to xenophobia, driving tens of thousands of Jews from Poland. 371 00:40:47,720 --> 00:40:56,030 But of course, by expelling Jews, the government had also expelled the last supposed alien against whom Polish national identity could be contrasted, 372 00:40:56,600 --> 00:41:00,829 thus causing the narrative of national treason for virtually any shortcoming to 373 00:41:00,830 --> 00:41:06,020 focus on ethnic poles with an intensity that was unprecedented for the time being. 374 00:41:06,020 --> 00:41:11,599 Scrutiny focussed on the communist regime then only was the title of a famous 375 00:41:11,600 --> 00:41:15,380 set of interviews with Polish Stalinist that appeared in the early 1980s. 376 00:41:15,860 --> 00:41:19,580 These Polish Stalinists were never Polish enough in Poland. 377 00:41:19,700 --> 00:41:26,660 Fewer people joined the Communist Communist Organisation than elsewhere, and more Poles entered the opposition than elsewhere. 378 00:41:28,880 --> 00:41:34,010 The crowning success was the United Front called Solidarity, the trade union Solidarity, 379 00:41:34,550 --> 00:41:41,900 which seemed to bridge the deep divides within Polish society, bringing together virtually all strata. 380 00:41:43,040 --> 00:41:46,489 We all know that work as intellectuals join solidarity. 381 00:41:46,490 --> 00:41:55,010 But what always sticks out for me? Timothy Garton Ash, his marvellous 1983 history of solidarity Polish revolutions is rural solidarity to which 382 00:41:55,010 --> 00:42:01,579 it devotes a whole chapter showing how the movement solidarity conquered even the villages. 383 00:42:01,580 --> 00:42:07,970 It was, it was indeed Polish national organisation. 384 00:42:08,630 --> 00:42:18,560 But no sooner had Solidarity achieved victory in 1989 than solidarity came apart in the so-called battle at the top. 385 00:42:18,560 --> 00:42:25,760 Splitting the movement to competing groups. Rifts were evident, especially in interpreting how much damage had been done by communism. 386 00:42:26,300 --> 00:42:30,770 In other words, almost as soon as communism fell, people began disagreeing about what did it meant, 387 00:42:31,490 --> 00:42:35,270 who was responsible, what should be done with them especially? 388 00:42:35,300 --> 00:42:39,470 Remarkable, in my view, having looked at other societies in Eastern Europe. 389 00:42:50,710 --> 00:42:57,720 It was the idea that on the Post write that Poland was pervaded by networks of conspirators who had 390 00:42:57,720 --> 00:43:01,950 controlled intellectual and supposedly controlled intellectual and cultural life in people's Poland. 391 00:43:02,490 --> 00:43:08,399 In fact, Polish, intellectual and cultural life and people's Poland in communist Poland was much more independent, 392 00:43:08,400 --> 00:43:11,520 much more connected to trends outside Poland than elsewhere. 393 00:43:11,790 --> 00:43:18,390 And the secret police was much weaker. A first jolt of the power of such beliefs came in the spring of 1992, 394 00:43:19,020 --> 00:43:24,509 when we were surprised to learn that the new government of Yan Olszewski was going to publish documents showing wide, 395 00:43:24,510 --> 00:43:29,250 split, widespread collaboration, including of the then president, Lech Walesa, 396 00:43:30,030 --> 00:43:35,009 the official in charge, a founding member of the Committee to Defend Workers in 1976. 397 00:43:35,010 --> 00:43:42,610 Core was Anthony much Ravitch. It's the best picture I could find. 398 00:43:44,470 --> 00:43:50,920 She may never let go. And this response was to essentially relieve Olszewski of his duties and form a new government. 399 00:43:51,970 --> 00:43:56,860 So this brings me to the final episode, episode nine To the Present. 400 00:43:57,760 --> 00:44:03,520 Anthony Mitrovic is now Poland's Minister of Defence in the present. 401 00:44:04,960 --> 00:44:09,760 Nothing is as fundamental for choosing which side to take for or against law and justice. 402 00:44:10,180 --> 00:44:21,430 Peace. As one's attitude toward the communist past and the supposed existence of a deal that 403 00:44:21,430 --> 00:44:27,400 was made in the late days of Polish communism to control post-communist Poland. 404 00:44:28,270 --> 00:44:33,310 And of course, more recently of the crash of the President's aeroplane near Smolensk. 405 00:44:34,090 --> 00:44:39,910 For Law and Justice, an article of faith that this crash was caused by a KGB run. 406 00:44:40,150 --> 00:44:44,440 Russia. To disagree is to side with the destroyers of the nation. 407 00:44:44,440 --> 00:44:48,070 To be a traitor. Pressured to let ski. 408 00:44:52,460 --> 00:44:56,810 Parliamentary caucus, head of law and justice. He's the man on the left. 409 00:44:58,220 --> 00:45:07,070 Started well, he didn't start. But I first got to know he referred to Lansky's work in history in Krakow and a book that 410 00:45:07,070 --> 00:45:13,580 appeared I think it was in 1991 entitled Dictator Trading the Dictatorship of Treason. 411 00:45:13,580 --> 00:45:20,090 It was a it's a story of the year 1947 and all of Kurlansky subsequent works as a historian. 412 00:45:20,090 --> 00:45:27,919 And it's he still is officially an historian or about the secret police and he has several he makes two basic points. 413 00:45:27,920 --> 00:45:32,730 The communist regime was not simply a regime imposed upon Poland, but rather like target visa. 414 00:45:32,750 --> 00:45:37,399 It reflects internal treason Poles against Poles and his is book. 415 00:45:37,400 --> 00:45:45,080 In 1947, he argued Polish careerists, rascals and profiteers had been willing to support the government imported from abroad. 416 00:45:46,410 --> 00:45:50,420 The second thing is that this this obsession with files, what is this about? 417 00:45:50,630 --> 00:45:55,760 And I think it reveals an underlying attitude. And the attitude is that things are never what they seem. 418 00:45:56,450 --> 00:46:02,029 The people in charge, the people's Poland may have seemed Poles, but they were not to let us ski. 419 00:46:02,030 --> 00:46:07,700 In a recent interview, for example, calls for Czech Yaroslavsky, a Soviet general in Polish uniform. 420 00:46:09,140 --> 00:46:14,000 But let's be had an interesting method of himself being uncompromising. 421 00:46:15,170 --> 00:46:20,600 He in 1970s, was a pretty well known figure in Poland's hippie scene. 422 00:46:21,860 --> 00:46:31,310 Went by the name of chess and according to and I can't verify this stories in the Polish media, it is Talansky who taught Korda. 423 00:46:31,610 --> 00:46:36,620 She's on the far left here, very popular rock and roll singer from the group Manon of the 1980s. 424 00:46:36,920 --> 00:46:44,600 The Virtues of Marijuana. So whether or not this is true, I can't verify that I passed on what I've been reading these days, 425 00:46:44,600 --> 00:46:51,290 the word target, which appears in the Polish press all the time, and it's not difficult to find it. 426 00:46:51,290 --> 00:46:56,960 I found it used by a very serious historian from Tottenham named Wojciech Polak, 427 00:46:58,100 --> 00:47:03,290 in reference to the fact that certain opposition politicians associated with the Civic Platform platform 428 00:47:03,510 --> 00:47:12,270 got Tosca agree that the European Union's concerns about Polish politics right now are just Vasek. 429 00:47:12,680 --> 00:47:21,200 Polak said the following target visa was absolute treason, absolute evil, making appeals to bodies that are not favourably inclined toward us. 430 00:47:21,410 --> 00:47:24,050 The European Union is inappropriate behaviour. 431 00:47:24,800 --> 00:47:32,600 European structures are under significant influence of Germany and Germany has strictly defined and egotistical interests when it comes to Poland. 432 00:47:34,520 --> 00:47:39,100 The behaviour of the civic platform is not a second cargo visa, 433 00:47:39,110 --> 00:47:47,720 but its lack of national solidarity is a sin toward the state and a mortal sin at that mortal sin. 434 00:47:48,830 --> 00:47:51,950 This is a phrase from Catholic theology. 435 00:47:51,950 --> 00:47:54,200 But please note for average Roman Catholics, 436 00:47:54,200 --> 00:48:01,280 there is nothing worse than a moral sin because there is no punishment worth worse than eternal torment in [INAUDIBLE]. 437 00:48:01,970 --> 00:48:06,110 So it seems that Professor Polak could work himself into such a passionate rage. 438 00:48:06,470 --> 00:48:13,610 The target visa seemed worse than more mortal sin and the traitors presumably deserving a penalty worse 439 00:48:13,610 --> 00:48:20,630 than eternal damnation for people on the right even to speak to Germans is a sign of a deep failing. 440 00:48:21,770 --> 00:48:32,300 There was recently an editor, an interview captured on YouTube that I looked at featuring the Polish, the editor of Polish, Newsweek, Thomas Leese, 441 00:48:32,930 --> 00:48:38,809 who suddenly he was at a demonstration and found himself confronted by a reporter from a TV station known as Republica, 442 00:48:38,810 --> 00:48:42,530 which I'm guessing is associated with law and justice. 443 00:48:42,530 --> 00:48:48,650 And the question posed by this reporter was, Why did you decide to defend our values in the German media? 444 00:48:49,550 --> 00:48:57,440 And you should watch this this video, it's beautiful. This practically explodes with Polish flags flying all about him. 445 00:48:58,010 --> 00:49:08,299 Said that this hysteria that has been stirred up by law and justice about German media was in fact a throwback to the days of what is welcome. 446 00:49:08,300 --> 00:49:18,620 Volker, the communist leader until 1971, when everything coming out of Germany, out of Bonn was just qualified as anti Polish and irredentist. 447 00:49:19,670 --> 00:49:23,840 The beauty of the discourse of treason in Poland is that it is always at least two sided. 448 00:49:23,840 --> 00:49:27,680 In fact, I think it's a multi edge if there is such a thing, a multi-age sword. 449 00:49:28,730 --> 00:49:36,860 So what Leese had done was disqualified. His interlocutor as in essence, being a servant of the regime behind Vladislav Gomulka, namely the USSR. 450 00:49:38,750 --> 00:49:41,420 But others on the centre left have done the same thing. 451 00:49:41,420 --> 00:49:50,390 In 2013, President Komorowski compared the supposedly backward looking politics of piece of, of, of law and justice. 452 00:49:50,440 --> 00:49:58,210 The policies policies of the target visa conspirators because they also had been backward looking patriots. 453 00:49:58,750 --> 00:50:01,960 The target visa conspirators, you may not know, actually call themselves patriots. 454 00:50:03,310 --> 00:50:11,440 Both of these groups, in his view, were misguided patriots. And Donald Tusk has likewise likened peace to the heirs of Tarkov itself. 455 00:50:12,020 --> 00:50:16,180 Still, I think arguably what's coming from the right is more shocking than what you hear from the left. 456 00:50:17,950 --> 00:50:22,980 Angela merkel has been compared to the Koch media, not only to Kersten, Catherine the great, 457 00:50:23,260 --> 00:50:33,250 one of the people behind target twitter at the time of the pull of the partitions, but without of Hitler and Nazi occupation of Poland. 458 00:50:36,280 --> 00:50:39,490 So this is a close up. And now compared to this this slide. 459 00:50:42,640 --> 00:50:47,030 I want to share with you an anecdote from the mid 1990. 460 00:50:47,090 --> 00:50:53,020 I was doing research in Krakow and I met an archivist who was very proud. 461 00:50:53,020 --> 00:51:00,670 It seemed to exemplify traditional conservative values, and I think in some ways typifies the attitude behind peace. 462 00:51:01,390 --> 00:51:07,810 Unlike other archivists I can recall, he always wore a tie, and somehow it always seemed to me that his tie was tied very tight. 463 00:51:08,440 --> 00:51:12,160 He seemed very uncomfortable somehow. Okay, well, that's subjective impression. 464 00:51:13,240 --> 00:51:19,760 This archivist and I had a very dispute about an interesting figure in the crack crack milieu. 465 00:51:20,470 --> 00:51:29,920 The literary historian causing me a vicar for some vicar is a towering expert who was a towering expert in modern Polish literature. 466 00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:31,930 For others who typifies treason, 467 00:51:32,860 --> 00:51:40,840 somebody who made a career of being too willing to compromise the post-war school stamp leave it and not as one should be near negligent. 468 00:51:41,890 --> 00:51:46,410 By the way, I wondered, where else is there a special word that makes it a virtue to be uncompromising? 469 00:51:46,870 --> 00:51:55,430 Neil G.A., the archivist, made a point of telling me that his own mentor and imposed the word for mentor's missed master. 470 00:51:55,540 --> 00:51:59,169 It's almost a term of reverence which we sadly lack. 471 00:51:59,170 --> 00:52:07,959 At the University of California, Berkeley was the historian Vaslav [INAUDIBLE], a man who supposedly never made a compromise, 472 00:52:07,960 --> 00:52:14,740 spent years in Stalinist prison, and because of his unwillingness to compromise, was elevated to professorship only on his deathbed. 473 00:52:15,700 --> 00:52:24,069 I think in the late 1980s, one day I happened to come across a document in my research showing that when Kofi Medica I a traitor, 474 00:52:24,070 --> 00:52:30,850 died in 1975, the funeral mass was celebrated by none other than Krakow's Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. 475 00:52:32,110 --> 00:52:39,159 The archivist was speechless. This didn't fit into the idea of communism, of people's Poland, 476 00:52:39,160 --> 00:52:46,990 under communism being a place where there was a struggle between uncompromising good and traitorous evil. 477 00:52:47,800 --> 00:52:49,630 A few days later, he thought about it clearly, 478 00:52:49,860 --> 00:52:55,540 and he came to me explaining that the funeral mass meant nothing because Christian charity required a priest to say a funeral mass. 479 00:52:55,540 --> 00:53:01,240 And I wondered, did the cardinal really take care of Attila, really preside over the funeral of every professor? 480 00:53:01,630 --> 00:53:05,180 There are lots of professors in Krakow. 481 00:53:05,830 --> 00:53:12,160 In fact, Beutler knew Vicar very well in 1938 for Tiller had attended Vicars lectures. 482 00:53:12,580 --> 00:53:20,379 Vicar was a a docent at that time, and during the Nazi occupation of Waterloo, and Vicar collaborated, 483 00:53:20,380 --> 00:53:27,280 cooperated in the underground university and crackled because the Nazis had closed all Polish higher education. 484 00:53:28,210 --> 00:53:30,760 So the future Saint John Paul, 485 00:53:30,760 --> 00:53:37,749 the second knew very well the difficult games someone like Vicar played in order to keep crackles philology at a high standard. 486 00:53:37,750 --> 00:53:44,830 And I think one can say that it did maintain good standards in an article of a couple of years ago at a mission he compared vicar. 487 00:53:45,430 --> 00:53:54,820 Maybe you can show another slide here is that during the war remission, he compared vicar to a practitioner of organic work and said that in 1945, 488 00:53:55,120 --> 00:53:57,519 upon emerging from anti-Nazi underground conspiracy, 489 00:53:57,520 --> 00:54:03,520 they had never even had a moment to think about whether he would embrace or reject the new regime. 490 00:54:03,520 --> 00:54:14,709 He simply continued his work without interruption. Historians in Poland, as is the case the world over, have to write letters of recommendation. 491 00:54:14,710 --> 00:54:23,230 And during my research on a book on universities that McRoy mentioned, I read lots of letters of recommendation in professors personnel files, 492 00:54:24,040 --> 00:54:28,089 and I grew accustomed to reading letters of true world class scholars, for example. 493 00:54:28,090 --> 00:54:37,060 Stefan on which or because of was vicar praising the work of scholars whom I knew were not world class and I knew that they knew were not world class. 494 00:54:37,780 --> 00:54:41,890 So the former were in the party I'm sorry, the former were not in the party. 495 00:54:42,340 --> 00:54:46,720 The latter were clearly these letters were done with the sense of the need to compromise. 496 00:54:47,590 --> 00:54:50,860 In my book, I cite some of the first class scholars, however, 497 00:54:50,860 --> 00:54:56,640 who bemoan the damage done to scholarship in People's Poland precisely because of such practices of compromise. 498 00:54:56,650 --> 00:55:08,860 Among my favourites are to Arthur Putney, Cambridge and Uranus loving Scott because you that is the last slide but didn't make it to back to back. 499 00:55:10,780 --> 00:55:20,829 So the Nikkei which was a columnist who taught for years in Torun I came to know because he was purged from the university in the early 1950s, 500 00:55:20,830 --> 00:55:25,959 but managed to land in a spot where he could make a career he wrote later on. 501 00:55:25,960 --> 00:55:31,900 So in the late early 1990s that Poland's Communists wanted to rebuild and create something supposedly perfect, 502 00:55:31,900 --> 00:55:35,200 but in their blind self-absorption, they liquidated and destroyed everything in their midst. 503 00:55:35,200 --> 00:55:40,480 Reforming. They got rid of people often the best, the most gifted, the most self-sacrificing, wanting to. 504 00:55:40,520 --> 00:55:42,499 Educated in a progressive and revolutionary spirit, 505 00:55:42,500 --> 00:55:48,020 they created ideal hothouse conditions for the training of conformists, opportunists and careerists. 506 00:55:48,740 --> 00:55:58,220 Uranus suave ska, who was taught theatre, Tetralogy and Lublin had cool and encountered Czeslaw Milosz to the to Stockholm. 507 00:55:58,700 --> 00:56:06,019 Nobel Prize celebrations in 1980 wrote The injuries caused by this purge of the humanities in 1950 have proved lasting, 508 00:56:06,020 --> 00:56:08,060 and in certain areas, the wounds have yet to heal. 509 00:56:08,510 --> 00:56:15,410 One Actually, several generations have suffered great harm by being denied lectures and contact with outstanding personalities. 510 00:56:16,820 --> 00:56:20,990 And I could I could go on. There are other scholars who bemoan the influence of People's Poland. 511 00:56:21,530 --> 00:56:27,409 At the same time, if you go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia, you can go to the websites of Slovenes, Girlhood and UK, 512 00:56:27,410 --> 00:56:34,280 which vicar and many others, and find dozens of publications and dozens of doctoral students. 513 00:56:34,730 --> 00:56:38,030 Our library in Berkeley is full of the works of all of these people. 514 00:56:38,690 --> 00:56:45,259 So I conclude ambivalently that the damage done by these compromises is beyond measure. 515 00:56:45,260 --> 00:56:53,989 But also I think the creativity, the value of what was made possible is also beyond measure and where the balance lies. 516 00:56:53,990 --> 00:56:59,180 I can't say. So now I'd like to make some concluding remarks. 517 00:57:00,550 --> 00:57:08,000 First, the attitudes one sees in the archivist I mentioned and in law and justice about communism have a direct attitude I'm sorry, 518 00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:10,040 a direct bearing of attitudes toward democracy. 519 00:57:10,580 --> 00:57:18,290 The man that I got to know with a tight time lived in a fantasy world of supposedly clean space that was also political space. 520 00:57:19,220 --> 00:57:21,260 Space where one in engage in politics. 521 00:57:21,260 --> 00:57:31,640 He had never made any compromise, so he and others in the post-communist period have drawn illiberal lessons from the communist period. 522 00:57:32,210 --> 00:57:34,700 This is not in keeping with the demands of open society. 523 00:57:36,170 --> 00:57:41,300 Second, I think we can still say that we owe much to this mindset about the evils of compromise. 524 00:57:42,020 --> 00:57:50,299 If it were not for this fiction that Poles must be uncompromising, we would have had much more facts of compromise, probably much less. 525 00:57:50,300 --> 00:57:51,890 What's the word worthy? 526 00:57:53,090 --> 00:57:59,450 Cultural and intellectual life in people's Poland, if it were not for the painful sense of injury felt by parts of who could not care which Uranus, 527 00:57:59,450 --> 00:58:04,100 Slaviansk and many, many others, the injury would have been far greater. 528 00:58:04,820 --> 00:58:10,280 So the age old concern about treason and compromise has had its undoubted usefulness. 529 00:58:11,720 --> 00:58:20,120 The logic of Polish anti-communism was this that the force and sensitivity assuring that communism would be weakly rooted in Polish society, 530 00:58:20,660 --> 00:58:23,720 also assured that even the relatively limited involvement, 531 00:58:24,560 --> 00:58:29,780 let's say, of Polish academia with communism is viewed in retrospect very harshly, 532 00:58:30,470 --> 00:58:34,730 much more harshly than in places where the complicity was much more widespread. 533 00:58:35,390 --> 00:58:37,520 And maybe that is a key to where Poland is right now. 534 00:58:38,870 --> 00:58:48,199 Third point still, I think for an outsider, the accusations levelled in Poland are beyond belief or beyond belief in the Czech lands and in Hungary. 535 00:58:48,200 --> 00:58:55,850 There may have been those who did not like Foxglove Havel or George Conrad, but who calls these two and other leading dissidents traitors. 536 00:58:56,450 --> 00:59:01,879 That, however, is the sad fate of people like on a mission, like the ones Czeslaw Milosz, 537 00:59:01,880 --> 00:59:06,740 even John Novak was referred to currently as having been a traitor. 538 00:59:08,030 --> 00:59:15,049 Fourth point. Every society I think we can agree has its divides. 539 00:59:15,050 --> 00:59:17,750 But the Polish one, the Polish divide seems especially deep. 540 00:59:17,960 --> 00:59:27,260 The unwillingness of the two sides on either of the two sides to accord each other basic respect reminds me of the impossible politics of the 1930s, 541 00:59:27,260 --> 00:59:34,130 for example, in Austria, where there was absolutely no compromise between the Christian Socialists and the Social Democrats. 542 00:59:35,240 --> 00:59:41,450 In an essay he wrote a few years after taking refuge at All Souls from the People's Republic of Berkeley, 543 00:59:42,620 --> 00:59:49,699 Lucia Kolakowski warned against expecting that any society united even during the Nazi occupation. 544 00:59:49,700 --> 00:59:56,270 He wrote in this essay it's called Pravda Polska from 1973, Poles were not fully united. 545 00:59:57,110 --> 01:00:02,540 I think Kolakowski point was to encourage sobriety among those who, like him. 546 01:00:02,960 --> 01:00:12,860 Contemplate this contemplated the sad state of the Polish nation in the early years of the Eduard Direct regime and were interested in debating, 547 01:00:13,820 --> 01:00:18,410 debating at great length the age old question of who exactly was responsible for Poland's woes. 548 01:00:20,480 --> 01:00:26,670 Kolakowski was very far, infinitely far, I would say, from making a nation any nation into a deal. 549 01:00:26,840 --> 01:00:30,410 He, in fact, wrote that no nation, no nation needs to exist. 550 01:00:30,860 --> 01:00:33,400 Every nation is a product of chance ship father. 551 01:00:34,550 --> 01:00:39,800 But he also wrote that every human being, indeed humanity itself, is in some sense a product of chance. 552 01:00:40,790 --> 01:00:47,120 Therefore, like human beings, nations have a value, a value worth defending if needed, with one's life. 553 01:00:48,800 --> 01:00:53,959 The greatest threat to a nation, he wrote, is to lose a sense of responsibilities for the nation, 554 01:00:53,960 --> 01:01:00,410 to lose a sense of responsibility for its own fate, and to accept the mythology that it has no freedom. 555 01:01:02,270 --> 01:01:05,570 Every nation has the freedom to live in dignity, he wrote. 556 01:01:07,550 --> 01:01:11,270 So who was responsible for Poland's sad state in 1973? 557 01:01:12,410 --> 01:01:20,220 To answer that, Kolakowski went back to where the late 18th century in 1790. 558 01:01:20,270 --> 01:01:26,950 He didn't use the word terrible visa. I think maybe he would have said that using the word target v2 was a gross simplification and misleading. 559 01:01:26,960 --> 01:01:30,710 But he did write the following The Causes of Poland's Fall. 560 01:01:31,250 --> 01:01:36,110 Where does Paddick actually lay in Polish institutions created by our nation? 561 01:01:36,950 --> 01:01:41,900 In other words, Poles were at some point responsible for Poland's misfortune. 562 01:01:42,110 --> 01:01:49,550 A very difficult thing to say, by the way, in the 1970s. If the nation is a collective that exists through time. 563 01:01:50,810 --> 01:01:56,300 It has. Poles have no choice, he argued, but own up to its own heritage. 564 01:01:56,960 --> 01:02:01,490 In this context, Kolakowski spoke of sin, but he didn't. 565 01:02:01,940 --> 01:02:05,390 Well, unlike Professor Polak, he didn't speak about mortal sin. 566 01:02:05,750 --> 01:02:06,410 Rather, he spoke. 567 01:02:06,420 --> 01:02:12,980 He knew a lot about sin, by the way, because he studied religion more profoundly, probably, than any other thinker that I can imagine. 568 01:02:14,090 --> 01:02:21,130 He spoke about original sin, the past Poles shared an original sin for which they were jointly responsible. 569 01:02:21,170 --> 01:02:27,020 Responsible because the past had created debts that the present had to the future. 570 01:02:28,890 --> 01:02:33,020 Point five And I think maybe my next last point in this essay, 571 01:02:33,200 --> 01:02:37,670 Lesley Kolakowski did not pursue precisely what Poland had lost through its original sin. 572 01:02:39,080 --> 01:02:44,780 But I would say that what it lost from a broader perspective was not simply independence. 573 01:02:44,840 --> 01:02:49,730 Clearly, in that period, he was writing about the tragedy of Poland not losing independence. 574 01:02:51,680 --> 01:02:56,089 I would argue that the loss of a Polish state in 1795 was a catastrophe, 575 01:02:56,090 --> 01:03:00,950 also in a broader sense for European and world history, because within 1791 constitution, 576 01:03:01,490 --> 01:03:10,820 Poland had become a democracy, an imperfect and developing democracy, but a democracy nevertheless in the midst of autocracies and monarchies. 577 01:03:11,810 --> 01:03:17,570 And it was a democracy 60 years before the rest of the region rose up unsuccessfully for freedom in 1848. 578 01:03:18,830 --> 01:03:26,180 Yet the Poland created by that constitution in 1791 was also a civic nation with citizenship based on rights. 579 01:03:27,140 --> 01:03:32,390 And this decades before the spread, the absolute spread of ethnic nationalism throughout the region. 580 01:03:32,390 --> 01:03:38,360 And who knows what mischief might have been avoided in and outside Poland had this state survived. 581 01:03:39,770 --> 01:03:44,809 So final point, I think you don't have to be Polish to feel sympathy for those students that I described 582 01:03:44,810 --> 01:03:49,280 in Vilna of the 1820s who wrote on Chalk that they want to back their constitution. 583 01:03:49,790 --> 01:03:57,230 Whatever one's views of Polish nationalism, there's a kind of pain and poignancy to the loss of Polish statehood in 1795 that can be felt by anyone. 584 01:03:58,220 --> 01:04:01,580 Historians have a certain responsibility not to overuse the word taro. 585 01:04:01,640 --> 01:04:07,130 It's not to suggest the problem then or now is simple treason by evil people. 586 01:04:07,910 --> 01:04:11,059 I mentioned to you that the talk about the Confederates called the. Ourselves Patriots. 587 01:04:11,060 --> 01:04:17,150 In fact, one of them, Paradox of History, is thought of now as being a leading Polish liberal thinker. 588 01:04:19,940 --> 01:04:24,079 Historians should be careful to to invoke this word and then learn to repeat 589 01:04:24,080 --> 01:04:30,050 it endlessly in order to ban all thought of compromise now or in the past, 590 01:04:30,350 --> 01:04:39,230 the past that they recreate, I think, incorrectly. I think if we can speak of treason in our day, perhaps we can speak of treason. 591 01:04:39,620 --> 01:04:46,099 I thought of treason of the class, treason of certain historians. Central tragedy, in my view of 1795. 592 01:04:46,100 --> 01:04:51,710 The tragedy I think that should be emphasised now was the loss of democracy, the loss of rule by law, 593 01:04:52,280 --> 01:04:57,470 the loss of a state guaranteeing separation of power, the loss of popular sovereignty. 594 01:04:58,430 --> 01:05:03,410 And I think all other lessons about this period have to follow from that basic concern. 595 01:05:04,220 --> 01:05:06,500 So that's my final word. Thank you very much for your time.