Emerytki

SW · Gość

No one with a grown-up experience of life in Poland under the Communist rule
should have the slightest difficulty in recognising propaganda techniques used
today to demonise the global Polish diaspora, collectively known as Polonia.
We had once known this surreal, Orwellian newspeak quite well, as a so-
called "propaganda of success", at its peak in the late 1970's. No Communist
apparatchik would be without it then, just as no Polish politician would now,
for this crude mixture of agitprop, stick and carrot delivers unprecedented
social control.

The political class of today's Poland has no personal experience of state power
exercised in any way, shape or form other than the pre-1989 Communist fetish
of social control. To them, social control is what prevents the sky from
falling down. Accordingly, they firmly believe it is the control that defines
the state, and not the other way round. Strong strings must be attached to
subjects, and state puppet masters must pull them as they see fit, and there is
no other way about it.

The notion of responsible exercise of power that spawned the checks and
balances of Anglo-Saxon democracies is a culturally allien invention,
incomprehensible to Polish politicians. The enjoyment of holding power in
Poland is the enjoyment of unfettered power.

Neither the politicos nor the mind managers of Poland have ever mastered the
true meaning of a difference between governance and reign. To them, it has
been obvious since the time they ruled the kindergarten yard, that governance
means giving orders and enforcing compliance; there is nothing more to it and
there is no other way.

The reign masquerading as governance of Poland involves manipulation of state
powers to compel individual behaviour of subjects for personal benefit of the
rulers. Reaching any defined goals is not the principal objective of the reign.
Its principal aim, and principal pleasure, is to repeatedly demonstrate the
extent of subordination of the ruled to the rulers, mainly by devising and
enforcing laws and regulations intricate to the point of baroque in their micro-
management of everything. Naturally, the rulers, their friends, business
partners and relatives need not comply. This results in construction of
gigantic and exquisite Potemkin villages of corruption, presented for foreign
consumption as cornerstones of democracy.

To convince the Polish electorate they are winners in ongoing transformation
from Communism, and beneficiaries of the wise and kind rule of a sage President
of All Poles, a reference standard of loser must be created. Every last Pole in
Poland must know what a loser is, before he or she can feel a morally superior
winner. An image of a miserable emigré, holed up like a rat in faraway ghettoes
of poverty, eking out a miserable existence through backbreaking manual labour,
is subtly promoted in order to create the standard against which just about
any excess of Poland's robber barons will appear a success. To deal with
professionals in the diaspora, an image of a greedy renegade, unwilling to
support the beloved Motherland, will do just as nicely.

Casting members of the diaspora as either rats or renegade Scrooges improves
the Polish domestic electorate's self-esteem no end. Obviously, if the diaspora
outside Poland are sewer rats or traitors, then those in Poland must
necessarily be patriotic Poles and economic tigers of New Europe, must they
not? Well, if not tigers, at least smart weasels in shiny coats.

However, when the primary premise is deliberately faulty, the conclusion
derived from it must inevitably fail. In reality, the Poles in Poland are in
the same rat race as those abroad held out to them as dead end, bottom-layer
losers; except the Polish domestic version of the race is much tougher, with
more stick and less cheese. The much reviled 'rat Poles' of Greenpoint, NY,
are about as representative of the Polish diaspora as dumpster scavengers of
Warsaw are of Poland.

The secondary objective of diaspora vilification is the propaganda run-up to a
forthcoming experiment in taxation without representation. Everybody in Poland
knows by now that the rats have had it too good for too long. And every Pole in
the West can well guess that Poland's appetite for free cash, with no strings
attached, is exactly the same it has always been - unlimited.

A social mindset is being created in Poland that may eventually allow a
declaration, at an as yet undetermined point in the future, that any and all
individuals of Polish birth of origin, irrespective of their place of residence
or acquired nationality, their children, heirs and successors, all owe their
dues to the distant Motherland. A 10% global tithe would go a long way towards
provision of comforts to 600 thousand state officials, members of the byzantine
local government, Young Communists League apparatchiks struck by the revelation
of social democracy in their middle age, and jackbooted nationalist populists,
decidedly brownish going on deeper and deeper black in their hue of shirts.

Such a development would see many dancing in the streets of Poland. The
economic tigers of New Europe (20% unemployment at the last count) truly adore
the taste of free cash, courtesy of foreign suckers. The Polish modern slang
for sucker is "leszcz", bream. Bream is a species of fat, tasty, and
exceptionally stupid freshwater fish. Honest work, just reward and personal
sacrifice do not taste nearly as sweet in Poland as a good bream does.

The prospect of turning the most or the whole of the Polish diaspora against
Poland by such a move is of no consequence to the political class. There will
be enough breams forced to pay by tugging the emotional strings tying them to
ancestral graves and ailing old parents in Poland to make the whole thing
profitable.

Altogether, my mood at all this is one of pervasive sadness.

The contours of old Communist Poland remain in plain view under a hastily
applied thin veneer of democracy. The Polish President, an enthusiastic
Communist Party apparatchik until the day his Party sank from under him,
declares his happiness with "OUR decision to fight Communism". My friends left
behind are increasingly inclined to accept I must have become a rat, since they
all know that my business skills are insufficient for a rich renegade.

And tertium non datur.

© Stary Wiarus 2004
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