Self-government versus bureaucracy, and the rebirth of communism in Poland. By Krzysztof Szczawinski (of Poland).

What is happening in Poland … is about whether nations … can govern themselves, or whether they are all turned into a gray mass that can only be administered until we die out.

Everyone knows what being administered feels like. You have made this phone call. Your case is being processed. The woman on the line is polite, and she can’t decide anything. Neither can her manager. Somewhere there is a rule, and nobody you can reach wrote it. Nobody lied to you. Nobody is responsible. You hang up feeling smaller, and you can’t say who did it.

Now imagine that phone call as a country. Then as a continent. …

Ask who has the last word in Poland, and the answer moves to Luxembourg, Strasbourg and Venice. And a year before Poles could settle it themselves at the ballot box, the argument arrives in riot gear. …

Popper put it most plainly, saying the question is not so much who should rule, but how to remove them without blood. Poles can remove Tusk in 2027 and Nawrocki in 2030. Who removes a judge in Luxembourg? Try it. Call them. Your case is being processed. …

Administered until we die out:

Tocqueville saw it coming, describing a power that doesn’t break the will but softens it, until a nation is a flock of timid, busy animals with the government as its shepherd. Communism needed tanks, and it lost. The new gray needs only forms, and it gets thanked.

Poles know that gray. We lived in it. The difference is that back then, you knew whom to hate.

Why Poland? Because Poland ran the experiment. For 123 years there was no Polish state on any map. Three empires administered the Poles, and they stayed a people, in language, prayer and memory. Then in 1980 the workers built a union … Solidarity. Poland knows from experience that a nation is not its state, and can outlive one.

But Poland isn’t safe. Germany, the land of efficient administration, is just across the border, and it is stronger and richer than us. It doesn’t need to plot anything — the forms do the job. And even to some Poles being administered may sound easier than the responsibility of self-government. …

Bureaucracy or self-government?

So the question is not whether Poland stays in Europe. It is whether anyone in Europe can still say “we”, mean it, and answer for it.

Nations are no longer conquered. They are wound down, in full compliance, with a final report nobody reads.

Donald Tusk and the rebirth of communism in Poland:

Post-communism was born in 1989, of a lie. We were told communism had ended. It had only changed its name. The communists handed over the government and kept the rest. The change was real on the surface and fake underneath.

Every lie needs a charming face. Post-communism found its best one in Donald Tusk, Poland’s Tony Blair: modern, smiling, fluent in the language the West wanted to hear. Brussels loved him, and in time post-communism grew into Euro-communism: the same apparatus, the same contempt for the voter, now speaking the language of “European values”.

 

This week, the face slipped. Riot police kept the Chief Justice out of his own Constitutional Tribunal, and the government called it restoring the rule of law.

A lie that needs the police has stopped persuading anyone. Lies do not die gently. They stand until the day they fall all at once. In 1989, we were told that day had come. It had only been postponed. Now this lie is coming to an end — and this time, the end will be real.

Good luck, Poland.