Poland has made a humiliating farce out of dealing with its red ghosts
Red Ghosts Haunt Eastern Europe by Eric Margolis
YouTube – Poles Apart – Poland
Embedding disabled by request
Polish Collaborators: Sons of Dzerzhinsky: The original documentation of Jaruzelski’s treason
Lustration
Lustration according to Michnik
The other Poland | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: “Lustration, according to early estimates, is expected to affect 700,000 people and take 17 years to complete. A list of names found in the reports of the security services is to be prepared and made public. Moreover, it is now the duty of every one of the 700,000 people subjected to lustration to declare that he or she did not collaborate with the security services. Those who refuse or file a false declaration are to be fired and banned from working in their profession for 10 years.”
Timothy Garton Ash: Poland has made a humiliating farce out of dealing with its red ghosts | Comment is free | The Guardian: “Adam Michnik, the influential Solidarity activist and political writer – argued for doing it ‘the Spanish way’. Like Spain after Franco, Poland after Jaruzelski should let bygones be bygones.
This approach can now be seen to have failed. In fact, about the only place I know where it has succeeded is Spain – and even there, only at a price. In every other country where the nasty past was not confronted, it is still plaguing current politics. Having conducted a friendly argument about this with Adam Michnik for many years, I was amazed to open my copy of his paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, the other day and find him arguing that the only thing now, given the Polish mess, is to throw open all the secret police files. From one extreme to the other! But to do this, while protecting basic privacy rights, requires a scrupulously neutral, well-funded, professional archive administration, with well-trained personnel committed to ensuring that, for example, purely personal details drawn from secret police snooping on sex lives and medical histories are carefully blacked out on the photocopies of the records that are opened. Such an administration is precisely what Poland does not have in its highly politicised, chronically leaking Institute of National Memory”
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1999
V THE POLISH ROUND TABLE REVISITED: THE ART OF NEGOTIATION
2:00-5:00 pm
Opening Remarks:
· Lee Bollinger, President, University of Michigan
Panelists:
· Lech Kaczynski, Professor of Law at the Catholic Theological Academy in Warsaw, Solidarity activist, participant in the Round Table for the opposition
· President Aleksander Kwasniewski, President of Poland, participant in the Round Table for the government
· Adam Michnik, Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Solidarity activist, human rights activist, participant in the Round Table for the opposition
· Bishop Alojzy Orszulik, Bishop of the Diocese of Lowicz, Professor of Canon Law, participant in the Round Table as an observer for the Catholic Church
· Grazyna Staniszewska, Member of Parliament, Solidarity activitist, participant in the Round Table for the opposition
Discussion Moderators:
· Brian Porter, Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan
· Maciej Wierzynski, Chief of Polish Service, Voice of America
Closing Remarks:
· Brian Porter, Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan
.
Polander 
2 thoughts on “Intro”