Joe Klein's European Listening Tour
Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.
Today's itinerary: Olkusz, Poland
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StumbleUponI am beginning to regret that I've chosen not to see Andrzej Lepper. It was probably a case of misguided responsibility: Journalists always seek out the Leppers of the world and blow them out of proportion. The mini-Hitlers begin to believe their own bloviations—look at the press, they take me so seriously!—and people begin to think that they represent more than just a minority, the lunatic 20 percent. But this is a part of the world where the lunatics have been known to take over the asylum, and so I've made a concession to paranoia. I've set up a meeting with members of the League of Polish Families, the moderate lunatic populists, in this small town 40 kilometers northwest of Krakow. These are, after all, devout Catholics. Their complaints should be heard.
I've already met with one of their leaders, Roman Giertych, in Warsaw. He is tall, handsome, 31 years old, and busy making a name for himself. The popular news magazine Wprost has called him the most effective member of the Sejm. And Giertych does seem almost responsible. His main thing is opposition to the EU. He proposes an alternative: an eastern-European free-trade alliance with the United States as a buffer against both Russia and the EU. He makes this sound something less than the ridiculous claptrap that it is. He denies that his is a religious party. Most of his supporters are just small-businesspeople. Can I meet some? "Why do you want to do that?" he asks. Because it's good to talk to people who aren't politicians, I reply. "Do you want them to be wearing peasant costumes?" he asks, derisively.
They are not wearing peasant costumes. They are wearing simple clothes. There is a doctor, a surveyor, a former businessman; the rest are workers or former workers, most of them in mining or transport. We sit around a long table, beneath a crucifix and a framed reproduction of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, in a small office building located across from a church. The meeting begins with a prayer.
I ask the group: How are things in Poland these days? And kaboom. Everyone is talking at once, everyone wants to rant. Very quickly we get to the heart of the matter. "People of Jewish origin got control and manipulated the Solidarity leadership," says Janek, a retired miner who is wearing aviator glasses and has the precise, angry scowl of a prison guard. He names the culprits—Michnik, Bronislaw Geremek, Jacek Kuron—and then the list goes on to include people such as President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who is not generally thought to be Jewish, and every other recent political leader. "All of them, all Jewish. The truth is coming out about their backgrounds now! They have stolen the assets of our country. The Jews and the Germans have manipulated our government and stolen everything. The Jews control it all. The Nobel Prize, the Oscars. Who wins the Oscar? Andrzej Wajda, a Jew who makes anti-Polish films."
I am waiting for someone to interrupt and say, "But Janek, aren't you going a bit too far?" This doesn't happen. My throat has tightened: I've listened to Arabs rant about Jews for years, but this is my first experience with the pure strain of Central European antisemitism. We are just the other side of Krakow from Auschwitz.
The Jews are just the beginning, however. There are the Masons and the insidious international cartels—run by Jews, perhaps?—that have brought IKEA and Office Depot and supermarkets to Poland. "They undersell our good Polish stores in order to drive our shopkeepers out of business," says the doctor, a woman named Maria. "The Masons tried to rule the world through communism, but that didn't work. So now they're trying to rule the world through globalism. Thank God for our protector, the Black Madonna, who is a source of light even in the darkest times."
Having determined, after 90 minutes, that there are no secular humanists in the room, I decide to bid adieu, with a broad, friendly American smile. They have one last question for me. "What is your national origin?" an old man, another retired miner, asks.
Well, I could take this several ways. I could just say that I'm an American, but that would be evasive. I could say, quite accurately, that I am mostly Hungarian, with some Russian and English ancestors as well. But I think about Adam Michnik, with whom I will have a delightfully sodden dinner in a few hours, and look directly at Janek the Gauleiter, and say, with militant casualness, "Jewish. I'm an American Jew."
We can't let this end there. A few days earlier, I had met Bronislaw Geremek, the most gentle of men, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, an intellectual leader of the Solidarity uprising and foreign minister in the last Solidarity government, a professor of European civilization now. He is 70, with wispy white hair and beard. We met in his rather bare office. He was dressed in a gray vested suit and was smoking a pipe.
"It's sad how quickly people get used to freedom," he said, beginning a quietly remarkable internal dialogue, in which Geremek's optimism and pessimism debated each other. "Freedom brought dignity, but it also brought crime, corruption, corporations with no sense of social responsibility. I don't want to grow melancholy and nostalgic about Solidarity. But it was such a clear, honest movement. And too much melancholy in the political discourse is part of our current problem. That may well be a consequence of the fact that we have so few statesmen and so many politicians."
"Like Lepper?" I asked.
"Politicians who exploit the mistakes we have made. The people trusted us, but we were amateurs. And yet, so many amazing things have happened. Here we are, living in freedom, at peace with our neighbors. At peace with the Germans!"
"That must be strangest of all," I suggested.
"Yes, yes. Before we achieved liberation, I visited Germany twice and it was terrible. Every time I saw a German in uniform, I had this shocking feeling of threat. It was very difficult psychologically. From my personal experiences, I could never, never think the Germans would be our friends, would be our allies, our supporters. I would never think that they would invite me to speak at the Bundestag." He paused here, his eyes misting over. "That they would invite me to the Bundestag to speak about German war crimes."
He paused again. "No, I will not add to the melancholy. Our Poland must be considered a great success story."
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Notes From the Fray Editor:
As Klein's listening tour wraps up, he has come in for much more grumpiness for traveling around Europe "on someone else's dime." Still, Faustus's post on the ICC started a nice little debate between Bracque and j thatcher here. And the post by Cato the Censor began an interesting argument about diversity, conservatism and what used to be called "The American Progress."
Notes From the Fray:
One thing that occurred to me while reading about the differences between the US and Europe is our conservative movement here. Our conservatives seem to have more ideas than nationalism. Our conservatives also seem to be much more vital, and have opinions and prescriptions on a whole range of problems.
Although I am not a conservative, I can appreciate the importance that strain of thought has had upon the US. I think that we were trapped in our own version of anomie during the Carter administration. For reasons that are not at all clear to me, the conservatives seem to have gone into hiding in the 1960's, and didn't really re-emerge until the late 1970's. While I don't think that Reagan really did anything of note as President, I do credit him with re-vitalizing the conservative movement. The conservative revival, which seems to have crested and is now beginning to wane, will in turn have rejuvenated the liberals, who were in great need of rejuvenating.
-- Cato the Censor
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